–Apparently the ties forged between Bears head coach Matt Nagy and Chicago Cubs manager Joe Maddon last summer are strong. The Bears have become even bigger dancers in the locker room after wins than the Cubs were. They’re setting up the disco ball, turning on the music loud and have called it “Club Dub,” much like the Cubs during their 2016 run to the World Series.
“I absolutely love him, I think he’s great,” Nagy said of Maddon. “We talked over the summer about a lot of different things. And we just, we believe in a lot of the same philosophies and one of them is having fun.
“And so the second we started talking for the first time about what we believe in it was easy for me to pick his brain and figure out ways that we could make it ours, as well.”
Nagy takes part in postgame celebrations, but doesn’t dance.
“He’s the bouncer,” Tarik Cohen said.
Now they’ve taken it a “step” further with a team dance-off on Saturdays, or the day before their games.
“I feel like it’s just made our unity just come together more,” wide receiver Josh Bellamy said. “And now you look around the league, like, I was on Instagram, and I seen the Saints playing swag surfin’ in their locker room. They’re not doing it like us, but all these other teams are trying to do it too.
“We’re the trend-setters.”
Some are better at dancing than others.
“I was in the middle, but they were usually pushing me out because they don’t want to see me dance,” Trubisky said.
The Bears of 1985 became famous, in part, for the Super Bowl shuffle. This isn’t as bold a statement. It’s more about team camaraderie.
–Wide receiver Anthony Miller has been targeted only three times over the last three games and not at all last week. He’d averaged 4.4 targets a game through the first 11 games.
“There are a lot of things,” Nagy said. “It’s nothing he’s doing. We’re at a point right now, and this is a good problem, but we have a lot of different guys on this offense and do a lot of different things. Depending on injuries throughout the season, depending on volume, where you’re at with the amount of plays you have in your playbook and moving guys around and doing different things, sometimes that just happens.
“He may come out here and have a totally different game and it wasn’t even on purpose. That’s the thing that’s sometimes hard for me to explain to everybody is I can’t always say who is going to have the game, if there is one, or if there’s a bunch of guys with five catches. It’s hard.”
–Safety Eddie Jackson limped around in the locker room this week with a boot cast on his right foot and ankle. He won’t play against the 49ers and most likely against the Vikings in the regular-season finale.
The hope is he might be ready for a wild-card round playoff game. In the meantime, Deon Bush will make his first start since 2016. Bush is confident he’s a different player than when he was forced to start those six games as a rookie due to injuries in the secondary.
“I’ve been here for three years so I know a lot more than I knew in the past,” Bush said. “And I’m just going out there and just playing fast right now.”
–The only player off the offensive side of the ball to make the Pro Bowl for the Bears was Tarik Cohen, who actually made it for returning punts. He leads the NFC with a 13.3-yard average.
“I mean I feel it’s more of a compliment to the whole team and not just me,” Cohen said. “All things have to go well to be a good punt return team – good blocks, especially defense too.”
Many players decide not to play in the Pro Bowl, but Cohen won’t be one – unless the Bears are in the Super Bowl.
“Definitely when I got drafted, I wanted to be a player on a team who makes an impact, not just be a guy, not just be average,” Cohen said. “So I feel I’m in the right direction.”
–Left tackle Charles Leno Jr., who proposed to his girlfriend Sunday on the field at Soldier Field after the win over Green Bay, doesn’t find the improvement of the offensive line surprising.
Mitchell Trubisky has been sacked the fewest times per game of any NFL starting quarterback (1.75 per game).
“We take a lot of pride in protecting our quarterback and running the ball,” Leno said. “As offensive linemen we definitely don’t want anybody to touch our quarterback.”
It helps having a mobile quarterback, but the running game has also been easier to establish as guards James Daniels and Bryan Witzmann have blended in after coming in during the season.
“It’s just growing over time,” Leno said. “It’s just like everything. It’s like me getting engaged. It’s going to take time and a lot of reps to get better at it.”
–Sherrick McManis didn’t impress in earlier efforts to play in Vic Fangio’s defense, but his ability to help hold Randall Cobb to three catches as injured Bryce Callahan’s replacement against Green Bay stood out on tape for the Bears.
Defensive coordinator Vic Fangio said it’s a different role for McManis now, and the comparisons don’t apply.
“He was coming in as a sixth DB then and we were doing a couple different things with him, one rushing him and obviously dropping him into coverage,” Fangio said. “Now, he’ll be the nickel and that’s an entirely different job. He’s had experience there.
“If you remember, he played there for about the first half of the 2015 season and then when we inserted Bryce, he became a mentor to Bryce all along the way, starting at that point and it has continued up until this point. I think he’ll be ready to play.
–The Bears couldn’t complain much about Pro Bowl snubs considering they had five make it and seven alternates, but one mystery was why nose tackle Eddie Goldman didn’t get an alternate spot.
His play hasn’t been lost on Fangio, who sees someone willing to do the dirty work inside and stuff the run on the league’s second-best run defense.
“Good, solid play, unselfish, in my opinion a quiet leader of the team,” Fangio said. “He’s a leader by example, by doing his job, not by using his voice.”
–The Bears have been excellent with penalties, leading the league with the fewest holds (eight), but their 18 false starts and eight illegal formation penalties are frustrating for offensive coordinator Mark Helfrich.
Pre-snap penalties are a coach’s nightmare.
“It’s very frustrating and that’s on us as coaches to get it right,” Helfrich said. “But that’s something that, again those guys work long and hard, they have to be right and again we have to continually work at that and coach them to do it correctly. But pre-snap penalties are ridiculous.”
BY THE NUMBERS: 5 — The number of sacks allowed by the Bears over Mitchell Trubisky’s last five games, one in each game.
