After Khalil Mack gets shut out, Chuck Pagano must get creative

Khalil Mack wasn’t in the box score against the Rams.

“Yeah,” Bears defensive coordinator Chuck Pagano said, “it’s usually not like that.”

It’s Pagano’s job to make sure that doesn’t happen again.

Pagano needs to scheme a way to make the Giants’ inevitable double- and triple-teams more difficult to apply Sunday. With the next six games meaningless for a team with a 1-in-100 playoff chance, he can afford to be more clever in how he deploys his star outside linebacker.

“We’re trying,” Pagano said Thursday. “We’ll continue to try to be creative and put him in spots and try to get him [loose] a little bit.”

The Rams passed only 19 times, throwing four screens and even more quick passes to protect their inexperienced offensive line. Mack got six pass-rush snaps, dropping into coverage five times. The Rams kept their third-down attempts reasonable, too — only three times did they need more than seven yards. That meant fewer obvious pass rushes for Mack and his teammates.

“We understand how they are attacking him and how they’re taking care of him, how they’re tending to him,” Pagano said. ‘‘They were going to come out and try to run the football and keep it third-and-manageable. A lot of third-and-one, third-and-two, third-and three, never really any opportunities other than four times to really rush the passer for anybody, not only him but for our defense.

“So just because he doesn’t show on [the stat sheet] doesn’t mean he’s not doing his job.”

In the Bears’ first four games, however, he had 4½ sacks, four quarterback hits and four fumble recoveries. In the six since, he has totaled one sack, four quarterback hits and one fumble recovery.

Double- and triple-teams have happened to Mack his whole career — he has been shut out of the box score on two other occasions. It’s the defense’s job, though, to put opponents in third-and-long situations in which he can rush the passer. It’s the coaching staff’s job to make triple-teaming him as difficult as possible. It’s his teammates’ job to take advantage of the single blocks they get to make the opponent pay.

And, as strange as it sounds, it’s on Mack to beat double- and triple-team blocks.

He knows they’re coming. So do his coaches.

“We absolutely tell him that — we tell him the truth,” outside linebackers coach Ted Monachino said last week. “We can’t say, ‘OK, you’re going to get singled 25 times in the game, and you need to win five of them.’ We can’t say that because he got singled nine times [against the Lions]. He got singled nine times, and he wins six rushes; that’s a really high percentage. That’s a high win percentage in a one-on-one situation. But we don’t know, down in and down out, when those are going to happen.”

Giants coach Pat Shurmur has to pick his poison.

“Certainly you don’t want a player with his skill and ability to wreck the game, which he can do on one rush,” Shurmur said. “The challenge that the Bears’ defense presents is that there’s other guys at other levels of the defense that you’ve gotta get your hat on. At some point, everyone’s got their hard downs. They gotta have success blocking their guy.”

The highest-paid NFL defender ever is on pace for nine sacks, the lowest total since he had four in 16 games as a rookie. He’s frustrated but, Pagano said, isn’t letting it affect his preparation.

“Khalil is a unique guy — he’s a great person, he’s a great pro,” Pagano said. “He comes to work every day, even though this is happening from the first snap to the last snap. He’s a hard-charger. He just continues to go out there and grind and do what he has to do for this football team.”