The quarterback got most of the blame for what went wrong with the Chicago Bears offense in 2019. Yet there is a sizable portion of fans out there who prefer to shift their anger towards head coach Matt Nagy. They feel that despite his qualities as a leader, his chops as an offensive playcaller have not lived up to the hype over the past two years. A big reason is his inability to get the running game going. Or even more infuriating? A simple lack of willingness to stick with it.
The Bears averaged 24.7 rushing attempts per game last season. Keep in mind this is with a mobile quarterback eating up some of those. So the 21st ranking in the NFL the Bears received was actually misleading. Nagy had a terrible tendency to get away from the run at times. That put extra pressure on his young quarterback to carry the offense, which he was clearly incapable of doing.
Former Bear Tom Thayer explained to Brad Biggs of the Chicago Tribune that there could be one major benefit of the team hiring Juan Castillo as their new offensive line coach.
“Interesting to me is that Juan and Matt have had a lot of sideline eye contact as coaches on the same staff (in Philadelphia),” Thayer said. “Maybe Juan can be more of that springboard of influence to, ‘Hey, let’s have consecutive runs throughout this quarter,’ or ‘I’m going to build you a bread-and-butter play that if the opponent knows we’re using it, we’re still going to use it and be successful with it.’ It’s always going to be the influence of the running game that is going to help you be more dynamic and deceptive with your offense.”
One thing Castillo mentioned when talking with the media is building what he called a “menu.” This will be a template for his linemen to follow so they know exactly what they’re doing each week with each opponent. All Nagy would have to do is select from that menu what he wants to do. By making things clearer, it might convince the head coach to trust running the ball more often.
Castillo wasn’t always known for building dominant running games. However, that wasn’t his responsibility. His teams generally wanted to go through the quarterback. Instead, his job was to make sure the run blocking was always efficient. That meant getting decent yardage whenever the team chose to run. This is something he was consistently great at in Philadelphia.
From 1998 through 2010, the Eagles ranked in the top 10 for rushing yards per attempt 10 times. If anything will convince Nagy to run the ball more, it will be seeing that it tends to work more often than not when he does.
