With every right to bask in the glow of a long-awaited victory, Bears offensive coordinator Dowell Loggains didn’t take long to acknowledge reality Tuesday.
“It’s good to get a win at home in September against a good football team,” Loggains said in his opening remarks, before quickly adding, “We’re very aware that it’s going to be hard to win NFL games throwing for just over 100 yards.”
Indeed it is. When the Bears parlayed Mike Glennon’s 101 passing yards into a 23-17 overtime victory against the Steelers on Sunday, it marked the eighth time in the last five years an NFL team has won with its quarterback throwing for 101 yards or fewer, with 15 or more attempts. Glennon actually is on that list twice — when he was with the Buccaneers in 2013, he threw for 90 yards in a 27-6 road victory over the Bills.
That doesn’t mean he’s good at it. In fact, Sunday’s victory did little to muffle the call for rookie Mitch Trubisky to replace Glennon as the Bears’ starting quarterback. But even with that simmering issue on the back-burner this week, Loggains went out of his way to let everybody know that Mike Glennon is not a problem.
“If you eliminate his dropped balls, he’d have finished 19-of-22 [instead of 15-of-22],” Loggains said. “He did exactly what he needed to do to win that game.”
Few if any outside of Halas Hall are buying that argument. After three games, Glennon ranks 23rd in the NFL in passing yards per game (205), 31st in yards per attempt (5.75) and 25th in passer rating (79.8) despite ranking ninth in completion percentage (67.3). The Bears’ longest pass play this season is 22 yards (to tight end Dion Sims). Every other team in the NFL has at least a 31-yard completion. The Bears, in fact, are the first team since the 2008 Browns to go three games into a season without a 25-yard pass play.
Not very impressive. But Loggains said Glennon was just taking what the Steelers were giving him.
“They were in a lot of split safeties — playing Tampa-2 a lot. They thought that was the best answer to stop us and stayed in it,” Loggains said. “I thought we did a really good job up front. Mike was patient. They took away a lot of our downfield throws doing that, so we stayed with the run more. I think a lot of credit should go to Mike.”
It seems odd that an opponent with the Steelers’ history of defensive excellence would use that strategy — in effect daring the Bears to beat them with their strength. You’d think they would load up the box and dare the Bears to beat them with a wide receiving corps of Kendall Wright, Markus Wheaton, Deonte Thompson and Josh Bellamy
“I think it’s [because] we’re throwing the ball inside the numbers pretty well,” Loggains said, “with the tight ends, Kendall Wright, Tarik Cohen — Jordan [Howard] caught some balls. I don’t know that teams respect us enough right now to say, ‘Hey, they can [try to] put a 12-play drive together and score on us, and we’ll bleed them out and see if they’ll make a mistake.”
In three games, Glennon has not inspired any confidence among Bears fans that he deserves to be the starter. But on Sunday, he was just doing his job, he said, even if he was getting booed for one check down after another.
“When they were dropping into coverage, I just thought the risk-reward wasn’t worth fitting in some balls [downfield], so that’s where the check downs came into play,” Glennon said. “At the end of the day, we won.”
That might fly today. But eventually — probably Thursday night at Lambeau Field — Glennon will have to make the most of what he’s got. Or at least more than he has so far.
Follow me on Twitter @MarkPotash
Email: mpotash@suntimes.com
