All-Twenty Tuesday: Bucs Defense vs. Chicago

Throughout the first half, it consistently seemed like Chicago head coach and offensive play-caller Matt Nagy and the Bears offense was one step ahead of Mike Smith and the Buccaneers defense.

It started off on the play above, where an RPO, led by quarterback Mitchell Trubisky, went for a huge gain due to the fact that the Buccaneers weren’t even ready for that.

Notice how defensive end Vinny Curry collapsed on the running back without hesitation, leaving Trubisky the easy decision to tuck it and run. With a lead blocker in front of him, linebacker Kwon Alexander couldn’t even get out to Trubisky, and even he was late to react to the Trubisky keeper. The Bears ran right at undersized cornerback Brent Grimes, whose strength is not run support, all day That’s not a lack of talent, they just didn’t even think of that.

The play above was the Bears first touchdown. There wasn’t much the Bucs could do here, since the reason this pass looked so easy was because safety Justin Evans slipped and fell, but it is worth noting the lack of pass rush. This was the first of many plays where Trubisky had all day to throw the football in a max protect scheme. The Bears used seven blockers to easily block the Bucs’ front four.

This was the Bucs only sack of the game, and it was a fun one.

Technically this was a 2-4-5 formation, as there were only two players with their hands on the ground – left end Vinny Curry and Gerald McCoy, who was playing nose tackle, as official defensive linemen. Defensive end Carl Nassib stood up and rushed the A gap, while defensive end Jason Pierre-Paul stood up and rushed from the outside and got the sack. The formation was weird, but guess what, it worked!

When you try to confuse the offense and the offensive line, good things can happen. This sort of formation and rush was very unorthodox and it worked with just four rushers. I’m not saying that this exact kind of thing needs to be called regularly, but if you were willing to try this once and it work, why was the rest of the game plan around it so vanilla – and failing? Why didn’t Smith go back to this formation or an off-shoot of it?

Alright, let’s get into the really bad.

Defense starts with what, class?

“Stopping the run.”

That’s right, stopping the run.

And what do you need to stop the run, class?

“Sound gap control and reliable linebacker play.”

Correct again!

Lavonte David and Kwon Alexander were bad against the Bears. I’m not going to sugarcoat it. The Bears did a lot of creative things with their run game, but Tampa’s linebacker didn’t know how to handle any of it.

That game was one of the worst I’ve seen from Alexander this season, and he wasn’t exactly having a great year before this past Sunday, either. He just seemed to be guessing and guessing wrong far too often against Chicago. Again, it seemed like a big-time whiff preparation wise. The defensive ends with RPOs, the linebackers with runs to the outside and certainly the secondary with zone beaters. The Bucs just did not seem prepared at all.

The Bears second touchdown of the game was where things really started to unravel.

No pressure up the middle, a step into a throw and one of the most underrated wide receivers in the game in Allen Robinson going up against a rookie cornerback with no help in man coverage. M.J. Stewart has shown some athleticism issues over the past two weeks. Though it is somewhat concerning, he is trying to take it all in a rookie cornerback right now. He certainly doesn’t have the recovery speed to be guessing, but I want to wait until I see him cover at full confidence before I say for sure if he does or does not have the speed and athleticism to play the nickel cornerback position.

Hargreaves was the same way in his first two years.

As the Buccaneers settled in on their single-high Cover 3 formation, Nagy and the Bears were more than ready to counter it.

Due to the fact that the Buccaneers refused to blitz and the front four was not disrupting the pocket at all, Nagy could call heavy vertical concepts, as seen above, that would overload certain zones of the Cover 3 and have players wide open.

No one really blew an assignment in the play above, it was just the perfect call against a Cover 3 look that had no pressure to go along with it.

Not long after the previous play, the Bears called the play above against the Bucs’ Cover 3 and it, once again, worked to perfection against the scheme.

The play above looked like M.J. Stewart just blew the assignment when we watched it live, but in reality, that’s not even his main zone area. The play was just perfectly designed to attack Carlton Davis’s zone to where there was no way he could cover both players. The Bills ran something similar to that last year against the Bucs.

The common name for this concept is “Post-Wheel”, but different teams have different names for it. The idea is that you have one route go straight up the sideline or slightly to the middle to flush the cornerback all the way up his zone. Then a secondary route would run a bit of a double move from an out route to up the sideline. The idea is that the corner on the sideline will already be following the outside receiver far up the field while the linebacker/safety who would cover the out route won’t continue his coverage up the sideline once the second part of the route goes vertical.

Classic Cover 3 beater. Nagy was prepared.

By the time the Bears scored their third touchdown of the half, Nagy was so far ahead in the chess game of offense versus defense that it was almost a mercy rule.

Knowing the Bucs would play zone on the goal line, Nagy ran a crossing slant with one of the receivers at the line of scrimmage, knowing the Bucs linebackers would shade their zone that way. Then he had his quickest offensive weapon, Cohen, toast the other linebacker, David, right behind him and into the then open space in the zone that was create by the first route running by.

Brilliant. Easy.

On the Bears’ next drive it was much of the same.

I’m going to be honest, I have no idea what Evans was doing in the clip above. He started sprinting up towards the flat and there wasn’t any player who even looked like their route was going to be there, at that time. Instead it just left a huge hole in the deep Cover 3 zone (maybe it was Cover 4 and Evans just went rogue) once again thanks to a vertical concept combination that overloaded one area of coverage.

I do not know what Evans was doing, and his absence in the deep part of the field made that easy.

Does that look familiar? It should! It’s a different variation of the Post-Wheel we saw in this game and in the Bills game. This one was mainly on rookie cornerback Carlton Davis. Stewart might have fallen for the screen, but Davis just did not recognize the Post-Wheel concept well all game and didn’t naturally pass the post route to the safety to cover the wheel in his zone. Rookie inexperience strikes.

The Bucs just didn’t have an answer or adjustment when the Bears started picking apart their Cover 3 zones. No pressure up front and no blitzes meant longer developing, vertical route combinations like that were open all day.

On my count, they ran some sort of Post-Wheel variation four times in that game and hit big on all four. The play below is Taylor Gabriel beating Stewart in a foot race down the field on a vertical route. At 5-foot-8, 168 pounds, Gabriel is small, and Stewart doesn’t touch him at the line and allows him to have a free release. Stewart should be mugging this dude at the line of scrimmage, but he doesn’t and pays for it.

By the time the Bucs switch to full single-high man coverage it was too late. Trubisky was already in rhythm and was dropping dimes.

Football is a physical game, but don’t ever let that fact allow you to forget that it takes both brains and brawn to win. It’s a chess game as much as it is a shoving match.

As for Bucs defensive coordinator Mike Smith, he wasn’t ready, and his guys weren’t ready. No pass rush and no pressure packages meant Trubisky had the time to carve up the Bucs initial game plan with not much of a successful backup plan after that. Tip your hat to Nagy and his bunch, perhaps it would have been their day no matter what. But the Bucs have to put up more of a fight than that.