Ask pretty much anyone around Halas Hall why the Bears failed to stop anything the Vikings threw at them in the first half, and you’ll probably get the same answer: execution. Coaches and players agreed that their plan to contain Justin Jefferson and Dalvin Cook was solid, they just didn’t make the plays on the field. At halftime, there wasn’t some big overhaul of their gameplan that led to their success in the second half. They just cleaned some stuff up, made minor tweaks, and played better.
That said, on Tuesday defensive coordinator Alan Williams took accountability for not doing his part to get the players better prepared to carry out the team’s plan.
“If there’s a play that’s not successful, I go, ‘How can I help the guys be more successful?’”
One of the tweaks Williams made was to call defenses with two-high safeties more often. Looking back, Williams said he should’ve made that adjustment earlier.
"That's where I think, ‘Hey, Alan, help the guys out.’ Like I said before, our guys are super positive on the bench. They look at me and they go, ‘Coach, just tell us what to do. Tell us how to do it, when to do it, what to do.’ Our guys are fantastic about doing that. If you have players that do what you ask them to do, ultimately the burden is on my shoulders, not the guys.”
Williams put the onus on himself again for his players’ troubling trend of starting slowly in the first quarter. The disparity between the team’s first half defense and second half defense is jarring. They’re surrendering 16 points over the first two quarters on average, which is tied for 30th in the NFL. In the second half they’re much better, giving up only 5.2 points, good for fifth-best in the league.
“It's my job to get them ready to go early on,” Williams said. “So it’s completely on me. And I think the better that we play, the more confidence that they’ll have. Starting off the second half, we are— I like to look at the positive parts of it— the second half, that we’re playing lights-out football. And so we just want to make sure that we can move that second half into the first half, first quarter, second drive, second quarter.
NFL
“We'll look and see what we did in the second half and the energy that we bring, the tackling, the turnovers, all those things, make sure that theyー we want those things to show up in the first half.”