Leonard Floyd has a problem. It’s a problem so many folks would love to have.
He has to eat. A lot. Often. And the Bears use his phone to remind him to eat. A lot. Often.
The Bears would like their No. 1 draft choice to put some weight on his 6-foot-6 frame and have tasked team dietician Jenn Gibson with helping in the process. So every couple of hours the young pass rusher from Georgia gets a prompt alarm on his phone that he is supposed to eat.
“I’ve got prompts set up on my phone of times in the day that I’m supposed to eat, making sure I eat at those time when I get the alarm,” Floyd said as the Bears’ three-day minicamp wrapped up on Sunday.
He can eat shakes, sandwiches, pretty much anything.
“As long as I eat a lot of it,” Floyd said, laughing.
The Bears ultimately do not care what Floyd weighs, as long as his weight lands on quarterbacks and running backs on a weekly basis. Floyd was considered by some to be a reach for the Bears at No. 9 overall in part because of limited college production and his mass for the NFL game.
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But “the weight thing’s not a big thing with me,” said defensive coordinator Vic Fangio. “He’s going to weigh somewhere between 230 and 235. That’s just what he’s going to weigh. We knew that before we drafted him. So it’s not an issue. We knew that and that’s a fact and that’s what he is.”
While the Bears are looking to expand his eating habits and quantities, they are going decidedly the opposite direction with what they want of him on the field.
Floyd’s college sack numbers in particular were pedestrian in some measure because his Georgia coaches utilized the full spectrum of his talents, assigning him to cover receivers down the field, sometimes play inside on the defensive line and occasionally even rush quarterbacks.
Now Floyd’s role will be simplified, to an extent, in that he will be an outside linebacker with obvious rush assignments in an NFL that approaches 60-percent pass. There will be occasional pass-drops, but the overall job simplification has already made a difference in how Floyd plays.
“It’s going to help me a lot only focusing on one thing, because I’m used to focusing on more than one,” Floyd said. “Focusing on one position really helps me a lot.
“I was playing a whole lot faster (this weekend), just having to worry about my one position and my keys. It’s allowed me to play fast.”