by Ben Muth

The Bears bounced back from an embarrassing loss against the Packers by beating the Vikings at home this past Sunday. It has been a disappointing season for Chicago overall. The team has taken a clear step back in Year 2 of the Marc Trestman era, and while Sunday's win won't do much to turn that feeling around, it was a step in the right direction.

The Bears offensive line is actually a nice microcosm for the direction of the team as a whole. They took a big step forward last year and had a lot of people in the Windy City excited about the future. This year they have regressed a bit. And sure enough, Sunday was a bit of a bounce-back, even if it wasn't a great performance.

The biggest reason the Bears offensive line has taken a step back this year is that they have been bitten a bit by the injury bug. Last year all five starters played in every game. This year Roberto Garza (center), Matt Slauson (left guard), Jordan Mills (right tackle), Jermon Bushrod (left tackle) and even Eben Britton (sixth-lineman extraordinaire) have all missed time. Slauson's absence has caused the biggest issue. The veteran was Chicago's most consistent offensive lineman last year, and his replacements (the Bears have had to play a couple of different guys at left guard) have ranged from bad to near-disasters. This week Brian De La Puente was filling in on the left interior, and it was an ugly performance.

If I had to describe De La Puente's game with one word it would be "lethargic." The former Saint looked plodding and unathletic throughout the contest. It didn't matter if he was lumbering downfield not blocking anybody on a screen, or oozing off the ball too slowly to reach someone on a zone block, it seemed as if he was playing in quicksand.

This really showed up when he was trying to pass off games or help other linemen in pass protection. Everson Griffen was giving left tackle Jermon Bushrod all he could handle on the outside, and there were a couple of times when De La Puente should have been in a position to help Bushrod, but he seemed to arrive too late every time. The Bears' first touchdown was actually a good example of this.

The Bears are half-sliding left, so Griffen technically wins through De La Puente's gap, but it's more complicated than that, and still mostly on Bushrod. De La Puente (64) should help his center Roberto Garza (63), because that nose tackle is rushing pretty wide. The issue I have is when he buries his head into the rusher instead of keeping his eyes outside where they should be.

Bushrod (74) oversets the defensive end a little bit, but not as badly as the Rams linemen that I diagrammed in this space last week, and I actually think he's smart to do it here. He knows he has help inside (or should have help inside, at least) and Griffen is a good player; it makes sense to try to funnel him into a double team. If De La Puente doesn't bury his head into the defensive tackle for a second, he's there for a kill shot on a spinning, blind rusher. You can see De La Puente tried to give Griffen the flipper for the knockdown, but he was just too late. If he could have gotten in there in time he would have had a great rib shot. When you get those big shots on edge rushers, you have to take them; it makes defensive ends a lot wearier to spin inside later in the game and just slows them down in general. It's a win-win.

But De La Puente is slow, and instead of delivering a blow to the Vikings' best pass rusher, he winds up stumbling around like a drunk on payday. When I said he looked flat unathletic throughout the game, this might be the best example.

(Also, if you think it's a coincidence that I've spent the first 500 words of my column on Big Game week singling out the poor play of a Cal player, well you just don't know me very well.)

Now, on to a scheme the Bears had some success with for most of the game Sunday. They ran it multiple times from different looks throughout the contest and almost always found nice gains with it. It was a Toss Crack concept that suits Matt Forte's running style very well.

It's similar to the Toss Bunch Crunch concept that we have diagrammed in this space before, but the biggest difference is that you only need two outside receivers, not three. That means that instead of pulling up through the alley, the play-side offensive tackle pulls and blocks the widest defender. Bushrod does a nice job on the play above. I should also point out that De La Puente does a great job of getting to the second level on this play (it wasn't all bad for him).

Aside from the left tackle, the other two big blocks on this play belong to the skill players. Both guys are blocking down: the inside wide receiver (Brandon Marshall, 15) on the defensive end, and the outside receiver on the first second -evel player inside. Marshall does a great job on his man, the other wideout, not so much. Even so, the Bears are looking at second-and-5.

Head coach Marc Trestman has taken a lot of heat this year, but I'm still a fan of his offense and how he calls a game. I think he does a nice job of being multiple in his formations and motions, so they can run the same stuff without the D picking up on it. Here's an example of the same play with a little window dressing.

It's the exact same play, to the opposite side of the field, with a tight end motioning across to act as the inside wide receiver. I love the motion from the tight end, because if you run this play a bunch (and the Bears do like this scheme), defensive ends will start to look out for the crackback block any time a receiver is lined up too close to them. By motioning the tight end into position, you don't give the defensive end as much time to process what could be coming. Here, it helps the tight end get a really nice seal on the defensive end. Let's take a look at it from the end zone camera.

That's a great job by the tight end. You may notice that the offensive tackle is actually leading through the alley here instead of blocking the widest defender. That's because the Vikings roll a safety down with the motion and he has force responsibility, so he flies outside of the down block from the wide receiver to keep contain. That creates an alley for the tackle to lead up on the guy who was originally the widest defender.

Before we get to my favorite way the Bears ran this concept on Sunday, I want to talk about a scene from the forever underrated film The Ghost and the Darkness. In the movie (based on a true story no less), there are two lions going around killing a bunch of workers that are trying to build a bridge in Africa. The lead engineer (played by Val Kilmer with a pretty awesome/bad Irish accent) sets up a contraption to catch and kill the lions. It goes terribly and neither lion is even wounded.

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Since Val Kilmer can't handle these lions on his own, his boss hires the world's greatest hunter (which was apparently a well-known job title back in the day) played by Michael Douglas to come kill the lions for him. As Michael Douglas is touring the worksite, getting the lay of the land, he notices the trap (set up in a rail car) and turns to Val Kilmer to have this exchange.

Douglas: The railroad car trap, your idea? [Kilmer nods] Douglas: An excellent notion. I used the same device myself once. Kilmer: But of course yours worked. Douglas: Point of fact it didn't. But I'm convinced the idea is sound.

With that in mind, let's go to fourth-and-1 in the third quarter.

It's the same Toss Crack blocking scheme, just out of an empty set and with Jay Cutler carrying the ball. I get the criticisms that came on this call when it happened ("their wide receivers are huge," "Matt Forte is awesome," "it's Jay Cutler, not Colin Kaepernick"), but I thought this was a good call.

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The detractors make decent points, but there are a lot of reasons why I think this was a good play call. To this point, the Toss Crack had been Chicago's best running scheme. The Vikings were probably not expecting it. They only needed one yard. And finally, it was there!!

If Bushrod blocks a cornerback OR Garza reaches a nose tackle, Cutler scores. (This looks like a really bad effort from Garza at center here.) Those are two blocks both guys made multiple times throughout the game. If they both make their blocks, Cutler walks into the end zone. If they had called a pass and a wide-open receiver had dropped the ball, no one would question the play call. But because this was a run, it became very easy to call out Trestman again. Obviously the play didn't work, but I'm convinced the idea was sound.