Cincinnati Bengals: 3 Reasons for loss vs. Bears in Week 14

Looking back at the Cincinnati Bengals’ Week 14 loss to the Chicago Bears to figure out why they were defeated 33-7.

What an absolutely pathetic performance. A week prior to this contest, the Cincinnati Bengals were up 17-0 on a Pittsburgh Steelers squad that is essentially a lock for a top two seed in the AFC playoffs. At 5-6 entering that game, they looked about as primed as possible to climb to 6-6 — reaching .500 for the first time in 2017 — and sit squarely as a front-runner for one of those two Wild Card spots in the AFC playoffs.

Cincinnati would eventually collapse in their usual frustrating fashion, giving themselves a 5-7 record and all but eliminating themselves from playoff contention. With four games left, however, the team still had some tiny chance to make a miracle occur and grab a wild card spot. To start that journey, all they had to do was defeat a 3-9 Chicago Bears squad that is terrible on offense and must be itching to fire its inept head coach before he goes full Jeff Fisher and ruins their highly drafted QB the way the former Rams coach tried to do with Jared Goff (and Case Keenum and Nick Foles).

Turns out, that isn’t as simple as it sounds; far from it, really. Instead of handling business in the easiest game left on their slate, the Bengals ended up getting crushed in an atrocious outing against an NFC bottom-feeder.

Here’s how it happened.

3. Linebacking Woes

It’s hard to remember a position group have such an awful day for a team. First, they entered the day with injuries galore affecting the lineup. Two of their three usual starters could not line up in this game: Vontaze Burfict missed the game with a concussion from that JuJu Smith-Schuster hit the prior week, while Nick Vigil missed his second straight game with an ankle problem.

With those injuries in place, their linebacking group ended up being Kevin Minter, Vincent Rey, and Jordan Evans. You would think that this combination — Rey being a successful starter here before, Minter having an underrated career prior to joining Cincinnati this season, and the rookie Evans showing promise at times this year — could do something against a dismal Chicago offense.

You, like me, would of course be proven terribly wrong. Chicago picked up nearly 500 yards on offense. Jordan Howard picked up 134 rushing yards and two touchdowns, while Tarik Cohen picked up another 80 yards. They averaged 6.7 and 6.4 yards per carry respectively, and Chicago picked up 232 yards as a whole on the ground. Trubisky had his best game as a pro, accounting for 271 passing yards and two scores (1 passing, 1 rushing).

This may not all seem to be on the linebackers, but look closer. Trubisky’s performance included an excellent passing day on intermediate routes — those are right in the zone where linebackers would be most utilized in coverage. In terms of the ground game, the Chicago runners wouldn’t be picking up 6+ yards on every carry if they weren’t consistently getting through the grasps of the second level of the defense — if you didn’t know, that is the linebackers’ domain.

This group was exploitable to an unreasonable degree against one of the NFL’s worst teams, and it made it impossible for a team with their own plentiful problems in tow to keep from getting blown out of their own stadium.