–Even on short notice, going to Detroit Thursday after playing Sunday night, head coach matt Nagy believes the Bears are prepared.
“We’ve been talking the last couple days about where they’re at, just yesterday and now today; I like the energy,” Nagy said. “This is about being mentally strong for our guys, coming off a big win at home and how’re you going to handle that mentally. And physically, just being less than 48 hours out from the game, how’re you going to respond to that.
“We’ll make sure all of that’s taken care of. There’ll be no excuses and we’ll be able to just go out and play our game.”
Offensive coordinator Mark Helfrich said the entire topic of the quick turnaround was addressed even before the first Bears-Lions game so they could take advantage of game planning from the first game while getting ready for the second one.
“We talked of hey, we’ll do whatever, ‘A, B and C and A, D and E’ are really good. Let’s keep that,” Helfrich said. “Or, for example, and again there is stuff that happens with them, there is stuff that happens with us as far as they played us differently than they played everybody else and then they played Carolina probably more similarly to us than they played everybody else.
“So there is some carryover.”
–Nagy doubts Trubisky’s style will change in the future much because of his injury. He’ll still run.
“That’s a part of the risk-reward,” Nagy said. “You’ve got to make sure they understand how to not put their body in harm’s way. To me, what happened the other night when he got hit, there’s nothing he could’ve done different. He’s playing the game of football and got a late hit.”
Trubisky’s slide on the play when he was injured left something to be desired. He seemed to want to lunge more than slide.
“He’s good at it,” Nagy said. “Because he’s running more often than others, there’s different times that he slides and different ways that he slides.
“I’ve been around some bad sliders, including Michael Vick, and he’d laugh at it. He couldn’t slide to save his life. We used to go out and put the slip n’ slide out after practice and try to teach him and he couldn’t do it.”
–Trubisky’s perfectionist mentality had impressed Helfrich, and he points to this as a reason why he’s made progress this season. He sees Trubisky’s perfectionist approach as the reason he’s made strides.
“You can see guys like that immediately, a guy that has to repeat every rep if it’s not perfect,” Helfrich said.
The strides have come in reading defenses or accuracy.
“If he flutters it four inches outside to the back shoulder and we still convert that’s ‘good enough,'” Helfrich said. “But if it’s a drill where he can control it, we’re reloading that play every time. And that’s great.”
–Defensive coordinator Vic Fangio was the latest to say Akiem Hicks belongs in the Pro Bowl. Hicks made his own statement on national TV by getting five tackles for loss against the Vikings, something no Bear had done since Alex Brown in 2004.
It tied him for second-best effort in the NFL this year. Only the Rams’ Aaron Donald had six.
Hicks had a key sack of Kirk Cousins on third-and-2 at the Bears 10 early in the fourth quarter to force a Vikings field-goal attempt. In addition to his five tackles for loss, he had two quarterback hits. One tackle for loss was a screen pass.
“Big-time players make big time plays,” linebacker Khalil Mack said. “And Akiem showed up and he showed out. You see what he’s capable of.”
If not showing up or showing out, then perhaps it was showing off.
“I’m a big family guy,” Hicks said. “My nieces and nephew are in town. This was their first time in Soldier Field, so uncle was going to put on a show for them.”
Asked when he last had five tackles for loss in one game, Hicks had to think back a ways.
“High school,” he said. “Or college.”
Not everything went smoothly for Hicks. Officials flagged him for roughing Cousins when he did a body slam on a failed two-point conversion with 4:55 left in the game. It gave the Vikings another chance to convert with a pass to Adam Thielen, cutting their deficit to 22-14.
“Unfortunately, that’s something I’ve got to work on myself,” Hicks said. “I can’t have penalties like that, being a veteran guy in this room. That’s hypocritical to have a play like that.”
–Heating up: Nagy liked the way running back Jordan Howard got going against the Minnesota Vikings in the second half. He had 63 yards rushing, although he again had trouble finding big chunks in the run game.
“From what I saw he was running the ball hard; that’s what it looked like to me, and I like that,” Nagy said.
Howard had his third highest carry total of the year, 18 attempts. That supports the idea he just needs to get more efforts to start running better.
–Kicker Cody Parkey’s game-clinching field goal of 48 yards removed pressure, but it doesn’t mean he’ll stop going to Soldier Field to practice kicking.
Parkey went to Soldier Field before the Vikings game after he hit the uprights four times against the Lions, and it seemed to help.
“It’s something that every week will be different, obviously as the weather changes and those type of things, if the tarp is on and those type of things,” special teams coordinator Chris Tabor said. “But it’s something that we’ll always talk about and address and I think it helped him. It was good.”
The concern the Bears had was just logistics. It’s 36 miles from their practice facility to Soldier Field.
“Going down (at rush hour), it took us about an hour and 45 minutes. It’s a long drive,” Tabor said. “Then obviously by the time we get done, traffic has subsided so we got home a lot faster.”
It still didn’t prevent two news helicopters from coming to Soldier Field and nosing around to shoot Parkey practicing.
–The Bears have four interception returns for touchdowns after Eddie Jackson’s latest pick-6. Defensive coordinator Vic Fangio is just as proud of the way they respond when their own offense has turned over the ball.
“We just try to drive home the point that we don’t control how we get on the field, meaning the situation, but we can control how we get off the field,” Fangio said. “So we just got to go out there and answer the bell and hold them to a field goal or get a takeaway, not just automatically give up the seven points.”
–Fangio will admit to being an old-school defensive guy, so the 54-51 victory by the Los Angeles Rams over the Kansas City Chiefs Monday wasn’t quite his cup of tea.
“The score isn’t what I’d like to see as a connoisseur,” Fangio said.
Asked if it could have been a watershed game for offensive football around the league, he added, “I thought 1958 Giants and Colts was the big game. I don’t know. I think it’s just we live in such a one-week news cycle in the NFL, let’s see what happens next week.”
BY THE NUMBERS: 24 — Number of trips by opposing offenses into the red zone against the Bears defense. It’s the lowest total in the league. Second-best is 27, by Carolina, Baltimore and Houston.
