There’s a little sports alliteration for you.
Chicago continues on its collision course with mediocrity.
The defending Super Bowl champions gave the visitors a dose of humble pie, keeping them out of the end zone with a decisive beat down, recovering five turnovers. It was a record setting day for Tom Brady, and a disappointing day for Justin Fields.
This story might have been about a deep dive on this devastation of this defeat….
…Except on Monday, Matt Nagy made the announcement that he tested positive for Covid.
About ten minutes before the customary Monday morning media Q&A, a member of the Bears media staff announced the presser was being moved to Zoom.
Protocols were put in place, and the coach held court from his car, using a mobile phone. It all must have happened rather quickly. The first thing that Nagy told the audience after acknowledging that he felt fine, was that special teams coach Chris Tabor would be running the team meetings.
That move was designed in the early days of the pandemic to provide an opportunity for the offensive coordinator and defensive coordinator to continue with their jobs.
“When you go through these situations it definitely, for different reasons, it makes everybody understand where we’re at, and how things can go, and really how the protocol works too, if you have the vaccination versus if you don’t. The part that I really believe in, and understand is, having the support staff that we have in these times. We showed it last year. Being able to pull together and get through times like this. What are the solutions? How do we get through this? How do we get better? Listening to what the league says, and us continuing to follow through with that. It’s something we will look into , and continue to discuss.”
Nagy continues to insist that Justin Fields has done a good job at growing into his role. “When you watch the tape, the result of not scoring points and having turnovers, with what happened in that game, there’s a a lot more that goes into it. We’re all involved in that. When we named him the starter, we all knew there were going to be growing pains.” Something Nagy noted happens to every single rookie in the league. “When you have a bad loss like yesterday, and you have a bad loss like Cleveland, you gotta make sure you fix it. That’s the opportunity we get against San Fransisco and it starts with scoring more points.”
When asked about his buoyant belief in his team versus whether the fans can and should carry this confidence as well, Nagy responded, “I get that. I one hundred percent understand that. Getting to the playoffs and wining the division (in year one). What a great start. Just as everybody wants to win and score points, and hold teams to less points, we all want that too. It comes down to us doing it. We gotta do it. We gotta perform and put the points on the board so that you win games. That’s our number one focus right now. Being able to understand. Yea, we talk about an identity, and we talk about trying to do certain things and run certain plays as a team. We need to score a lot more points. However we do that, it doesn’t matter. We got to score more points so we can win. if we all have that same mind set of fixing it, We gotta do it.”
Justin Fields for his part said, “When you get blown out, you There are two choices, you can either say ‘F-‘ it, I’m going to stop working, I’m going to stop playing, or you can go the other route of I’m going to keep working. No matter how many picks I throw, no matter how many L’s we take, I keep going. That’s who I am. I’m never going to stop.”