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There is plenty of blame to go around but nothing bothered me more than a very expensive IOL missing blocks.

That's not an option. If we lock the ball out of bounds and they decline. The ball would be spotted where it went out of bounds. Kicks Out of Bounds:If a kick goes out of bounds before being touched by a player, the penalty is 25 yards past the spot of the kick, or the ball is placed at the spot it left the field of play, whichever is more advantageous to the receiving team.

That is correct.

Nope. He was directly told to kick it out the back of the end zone. Straight from Ben Johnson's press conference.

After watching an all-22, Caleb deserves a lot of credit for missing reads and not getting the ball to open WRs. I paid attention to Braxton Jones and I only see 3 times where his guy gave pressure to Caleb. He played well in my opinion.

Good point, more hollow yards.

Lions favored by 6, the 4th biggest spread of the week. For how bad the Bears looked, the Lions looked worse in Week 1. For EPA/P for the offense and defense, after Week 1: Bears 23rd and 6th Lions 22nd and 26th The Lions defense was bad and lucky they didn't give up 40. The Bears were unlucky and gave up 27. I don't think the Bears defense allows that much again. I also think the offense musters at least another TD (to replace the defensive one from Week 1) but I don't trust Santos at all. So I am going with 24-20 Bears. One of these teams is going home 0-2 on Sunday, both overall, and in the Division. Hopefully the team rises up for Ben as he got a lot of hate leaving Detroit for no good reason.

Several things are fixable but If it continues , I dont think BJ keeps Hightower around.

The missed field goal also gave Vikings real good field position.

Yes , we also had a punt partial blocked. I read where Santos was told to kick the ball out of bounds. It would give them the ball at the 40 but would have given us another clock stop for the 2 minute warning. Now with several backups starting did that pull them off of the ST plays? We missed the tackling ability of TJ Edwards and Kyler Gordon.

There was a couple bad calls. They gave Dayo a personal foul for hitting to the head and the replay clearly shows him under the helmet.

Everything I am reading is that it is considered a penalty. Here is a snippet from an article talking about it comparing it to a touchback: "By contrast, a kick that goes out of bounds would be flagged as an illegal procedure penalty, and the ball would come out to the 40-yard line, a difference of five yards." So if it was deemed a penalty, then it would've been pointless to do that as MIN could just decline and ask to rekick. The best option was probably the onside, but then with MIN's kicker they are almost already in FG range with a normal recovery.

My Bears collapsed like my A+ yahoo fantasy team. I hope they both rebound because I want to be happy on Sundays and not use swear words.

I like this way of thinking. As an official, I understand impact to the game. The NFL guys do as well. I actually officiated an arena game several years ago with the white hat from last night. He’s a great official and person from my limited interaction. But he missed on the holding call because he didn’t see the entire play. He turned his head too slowly to his key and stayed on the middle too long. And the DPI was a matter of a bad angle. That official guessed because he didn’t see the contact fully. He shouldn’t have thrown the flag and deferred it to a colleague. What’s more, one of the others should have come to him after and talked him into picking it up. Those two plays directly impacted the game.

Yeah, no one is catching his balls.🫣 He has a lot of pressure playing for a team with fans that haven't eaten in decades. The Bears bring all these food trucks in and get mouths watering and the doors open and nothing.

The Bears should take a page out of Sean McVay's book from the first couple years he had with Jared Goff. He ran a mostly no-huddle offense that wasn't necessarily up-tempo, but it allowed Goff to look to the sidelines for the playcall, like in college, and gave them plenty of time to get all their motions in. Part of the problem last night is that they weren't getting to the line quick enough to do all the motions, and I think it affected the thought process of the QB. It's been clear to me that Caleb Williams has been at his best in the no-huddle offense. I'm not going to skewer Johnson after one game, but he's got to use this to his advantage at some point and not be so rigid about his preferred methods. I really think it could make a huge difference for this offense if they integrated the no-huddle more often moving forward.

I'm reading that it's automatically placed on the 40.

One other thing to note. Williams took a hit to his right shoulder on his rushing TD. It seemed like every throw after that was a chore. Might be unrelated, but if he had any kind of tightness that could affect his throwing motion, that might account for him overcompensating.

Williams now has 597 passing attempts in his career with only 6 INTs. With 4 more attempts without one, his INT% will be under 1.0. The only QB under 1.4 is Jacoby Brissett at 1.36. Aaron Rodgers is at 1.4. Justin Herbert is the only other QB under 1.7%. To put that into perspective, Williams could throw 2 INTs in his next 3 passing attempts and still have the lowest INT% in NFL history.

I know people love PFF grades. Top 3 and Bottom 3 players from both sides: 1. Wright - 77.9 2. Williams - 77.1 <insert eyeball emoji here> 3. Zaccheaus - 72.1 14. Loveland - 52.1 15. Monangai - 51.4 16. Jackson - 31.0 > very concerning. It felt like he either had a false start or missed a block. 1. Owens - 74.9 2. Wright - 74.4 3. Stevenson - 69.1 > played surprisingly well 15. McCloud - 44.1 16. Williams - 42.2 17. Billings - 34.3 > concerning considering his RDEF grade was 37.7.

From what I have seen online, since it would be a penalty, MIN could just decline and make him rekick. So the only other option was to go for an onside kick and try to tackle them within 3 seconds, which is not a guarantee.

Carmen and Jurko were blowing major crap to Johnson for not having Santos kick the ball the ball out of bounds due to him not being able to kick it out the back.

Here is the fake holding call on Wright, it is one of the worst calls I have seen in a long time, with the ref looking right at it:

Yeah, absolutely, luckily Owens made a great tackle on the next play so it didn't cost the Bears points. It just sucks because now this hangs over everyone's heads. The game is over if the Bears score a TD with first and 10 at the 12 if Wright is not called for touching a defender as he falls to the ground. To me it just felt like the league didn't want a blowout on MNF and all of a sudden, in the 4th quarter, they start making all of these phantom calls, but only on the Bears. Mason had 2 long runs (both in 4Q, both on TD drives) where there was clearly holding right at the point of attack, which is an easy call because in order for the hole to be that big it's either a missed gap assignment or a hold. The Bears were held both times, no call.

So I think we can safely say that some of the preseason can be correlated to the regular season. Special Teams was an issue in the preseason, and it was also in Week 1. On punts, MIN's PR Price averaged 17.0 on his returns (which is crazy). Duvernay averaged 9.3. The Bears lost 31 net yards in punt coverage. Wright was 7-333 on punts averaging 47.6. Taylor was 6-266 for only 44.3 per punt. So the Bears lost another 20 net yards in just punts. That is 51 lost yards without the offense or defense on the field, which basically equates to at least 3 pts. I don't know how a punter loses 10 yards off his punts from college to the pros. Then our glorious Captain Kicker got to watch Reichard go 2/2 on FGs and hit a 59-yarder while Santos missed a 50-yarder going the same way and couldn't kick the ball out of the end zone to save his life. He also barely made his lone FG. All in all, not good. At some point will Hightower ever be held accountable?