Once again, the Bears look like a house of cards. If Urlacher,Briggs or Peppers has an injury,it will only get uglier. My question is,what can Lovie do about it. He is handed another roster devoid of talent at DT,O-Line,WR,TE,SS,WS. The Bears have squandered draft choices on two injury prone OL and have done little else. Lovie has made some poor time management decisions,but he has a knack of keeping his team in most games and overall,I think he has done a pretty good job. If the downward spiral continues,I would understand if he got fired,but he isn't first on my list.

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favrefan said:"Chris Coghlan isn't gonna pay your rent, Jimmy."

IMO it is his knack of keeping his team in most games that may in fact be the problem. The man makes a edible and sometimes tasty shit sandwich....therefore...why change the ingredients.

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That's my purse! I don't know you!

UMN touched on it... Lovie is a good (albeit flawed, such as his extremely poor clock management skills) head coach. He's got nothing to work with. Last year's team had no business (queue Clint Howard 'NO BUSINESS! NO BUSINESS!') being 11-5.
This year, I don't care who is coaching them, you've got a terrible Offensive line, terrible. That means that no matter how good your QB is you're gonna get him turned into hamburger. And if he's dead, it don't matter how GOOD he was when he was alive... he's still dead. Even if and when he can get the ball out of his hands, Cutler has nobody to throw to.
Couple that with the fact that the best parts of your defense aren't getting any younger... Tillman's best days are absolutely behind him, and Urlacher, while still good, doesn't seem to be able to carry the D any more. Briggs isn't finishing tackles and the safety situation is a fucking joke.
So, you might be the best NASCAR driver out there but if you're not in a good solid car, say you're driving a LeCar, you're not drinking the milk.

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"Play until it hurts, then play until it hurts to not play."
http://soundcloud.com/darkside124 HOF 2013, MM Champion 2014

We better take a timeout I we are gonna discuss this.

He hired Martz.

Lovie's in the same spot as Kenny Williams' managers are: no team to work with.

So from that standpoint, I can't judge Lovie too harshly. Except, I've seen his lack of flexibility, inability to tweak gameplans, and his coordinators have been worse along the same lines.

But do I blame him 100%? No. Angelo's complicity has to be in the 60-70% range.

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Middle Aged Crazy, like Uncle Terry

Beebo,
That's about how I see it. Angelo should be no higher than a scout in any other organization.
I'm waiting for the NEW McCaskey to do something bold. He might be worse than Ricketts in regards to playing the waiting game.

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favrefan said:"Chris Coghlan isn't gonna pay your rent, Jimmy."

i can't believe what i am reading, lovie is a terrible in game coach...lovie hired martz and brought in archuletta and pace, he also makes the roster decisions...letting lloyd go was dumb, letting thomas jones go was dumb..keeping tommie harris too long was dumb..jerry angelo is not your typical egomaniac g.m. he is scared to make bold moves alone, he includes lovie and the scouts on draft day decisions....olsen traded to start davis was dumb...this team may not have the talent like detroit or greenbay but smith is part of the blame...all these guys deserve to be fired and until a house cleaning happens this franchise is all downhill

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1. This defense is all Lovie. Marinelli is just a puppet for him. Chico got run out of town because he wanted to go more aggressive with it and Lovie refused. "Bend don't break" sucks big donkey balls. It's an ancient defense that every decent offense knows how to beat.

2. He brought in the rigid Martz.

3. He has some say with his personel. It's not Angelo calling ALL of the shots

4. Clock/time out management

5. Smug, defiant interviews/press conferences

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Bob Babich blitzed more than any other DC in the NFL during his time in Chicago. Ron Rivera was run out of town because he and Lovie didn't like one another.

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Fire Phil Emery

1. IB already addressed a couple items here. But also the scheme is not the problem. Lovie's defense is fine and if you have the right personnel you can be successful. The problem with the defense is they are getting old and do not have any depth.

2. No doubt a bad hire. But it was not like there were many better options available at the time. Several people they wanted turned them down. In retrospect they probably should have kept Turner.

3. Sure Lovie has some say, but the buck stops with Angelo here. He is the one responsible for making these calls.

4. Lovie does struggle here, but if you have watched much of the NFL over the last few years so does every other coach.

5.

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"He is a loathsome, offensive brute
--yet I can't look away."

1. ANY defense can be "fine" with the right personnel. Sticking with your scheme when you don't have the "right" personnel is just plain stubborn and stupid.

2. Everyone knew what they'd be getting with Martz, and they got it (see #1). There's always another option.

3. Yes, Angelo shoulders most of the blame, but how many more ex-Rams do you need to see starting here before you believe he has a lot of say?

4. I've never seen a coach blow multiple TOs on the same play as much as Lovie, or be as consistently bad at clock management from game to game.

5. Good Lovie impression.

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1. What defensive scheme would fit our personnel better? There is no scheme designed for old.

2. So who was the other option? At that point in time they were pretty much at the bottom of the barrel.

3. If the players were not right for the team then Angelo should be the GM and tell him no they won't work, so obviously Angelo was in agreement with him.

4. I am not sure how you go about proving that. Just about every game I watch on Sunday has a bad time management issue with the coach. Again, no doubt Lovie is bad at this.

5. You have always seemed like a pretty intelligent guy around here, so I am honestly surprised to see you go this meatball route here.

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"He is a loathsome, offensive brute
--yet I can't look away."

Oy. Agreed that Martz is not working out, but Ron Turner has all the imagination and moxie of Grimace.

No but his defense relies on elite talent at key positions. It doesn't work on a consistent basis. It's not the sign of a good competitive team.

what scheme relies on non-elite talent?

Please show me a really good defense that does not have a couple elite level players.

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"He is a loathsome, offensive brute
--yet I can't look away."

the jets have one elite player and seem to be pretty elite as a unit..that is coaching/scheming..the bears have 2-3 elite players and suck on defense

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I'm going to use letters damnit!!!!!

a. The Defensive line is the main problem. Especially the tackles which was suppose to be good with depth.

b. The deep passes for TDs against us this year have been cuz our safties were stupid. They bit when they shouldn't have. I'm talking that Saints TD, the Carolina TD to Smith and the Lions TD.

c. Urlacher is slower. You can see it. He's not horrible cuz he still has goood instincts, but he's on the decline.

The Jets are an average defense this year. And their record shows it, 2-3.

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"He is a loathsome, offensive brute
--yet I can't look away."

There are teams that have had injuries that still succeed, Bears aren't built, not only, to survive that, but it sends them into almost a tailspin. They also seemingly ignore other defensive positions while searching for the perfect DEs or DTs. I think that is a shit philosophy.

Again, this is a personnel/depth problem, not one about the scheme.

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"He is a loathsome, offensive brute
--yet I can't look away."

(Spoiler Alert: This is not a defense of Mike Martz)

Many people say a big part of the issue with the Martz offense is that it's no longer groundbreaking. Every team has caught up, and there's better, newer options available. It was fresh, new, and on turf in 2000.

Put this offensive squad, in St. Louis, in the year 2000. They could run every play the same as the Super Bowl Champion Rams, and it would look like the movie Little Giants.

Does Lovie have flaws? Absolutely. I used more curse words with :08 seconds left in the first quarter and no timeouts Monday, than I have after each second round pick is cut one year later. But this falls on Jerry Angelo. Did he take some bad suggestions to add old St. Louis Rams? Yep. They looked like LA Rams. But this falls on the office.

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But when that happens you need to be prepared to or able to adjust. Work with what you do have. They don't do that. They ask of their players what they are not capable of. They've ignored too much.

So you really want Lovie to switch defensive schemes in the middle of the year? You want him to switch to a scheme that he has no experience with? That makes no sense.

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"He is a loathsome, offensive brute
--yet I can't look away."

Granted it was not on the defensive side, but Lovie has forced a scheme change in the middle of the season. It was based on personnel. It happened with the offense last year.

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I expect a competent coach to adjust to his talents.....play to his team's strengths. Right now, on both offense and defense, they're using a scheme which isn't working with the current talent level. They're still using it despite not having the personnel. What's the definition of insanity again?

And as for the meatball comment, it's not a reason why he should or should not be head coach, it's the icing on the cake on why I get so frustrated with him. It's not much different from when my 6 year old does something wrong then tries to give me attitude about it. Doing something wrong can be frustrating enough, but the attitude on top it it just makes it exponentially worse.

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Again, what scheme would work better with our talent level?

No coach changes defensive schemes in the middle of the season. Every coach makes adjustments during the season in their normal scheme. Lovie and the defensive coaches make adjustments constantly. Most of them go completely unnoticed to the fans.

Do you realize how bad things would be here if they scrapped their defensive scheme and started over in the season? It would be brutal.

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"He is a loathsome, offensive brute
--yet I can't look away."

I'm not an NFL head coach or coordinator. I don't know exactly what changes should take place or how they'd be implemented. I do know that what they're running now is not working, yet they keep trotting it out there. Now they're just swapping personnel. It hasn't worked in the past and I don't see it working now.

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If Martz & Lovie can change and tweak offensive schemes midseason like they did last year, why can't the change defense schemes? I'm not saying start over, but outside of the Atlanta game, the defensive scheme this year (whatever that may be) is not working. They are getting torched on the run and giving big plays week after week. Part of that is execution and that is on the players as well as the coaches, but part of it is the scheme too.

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Wow, lotta Lovie hate considering if Cutler wasnt a quitter they could have been in the Super Bowl last year.


Lovie is a winning coach.