The Bears are getting pressure — but few sacks

Despite ranking fourth in the NFL in pressure rate — a third of opposing drop-backs end in quarterback hurries, knockdowns or sacks — the Bears have only six sacks this season. Only seven NFL teams have fewer.

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Bears defensive end Robert Quinn celebrates a sack against the Giants on Jan. 2.

Bears defensive end Robert Quinn celebrates a sack against the Giants on Jan. 2.

Photo by Quinn Harris/Getty Images

The Bears need to sack the quarterback.

“I don’t know if there’s such a thing as too many sacks or too many pressures,” defensive coordinator Alan Williams said this week. “There’s no such thing. That’s like a car being too fast or having too much money. You can’t have too much or too many.”

Maybe so. By any measure, what the Bears are doing now is not enough. 

Despite ranking fourth in the NFL in pressure rate — a third of opposing drop-backs end in quarterback hurries, knockdowns or sacks — the Bears have only six sacks. Only seven NFL teams have fewer. 

The game Sunday gives them a chance to get right. The Giants allow a sack on 12.4% of their pass plays, the second-highest rate in the league behind, of course, the Bears. Amazingly, both teams have a quarterback best-known for his athleticism. The Giants’ Daniel Jones, in theory, should be able to escape pressure. He hasn’t this season, though, having been sacked 13 times, third-most in the league. 

Jones provides a vastly different challenge than Texans quarterback Davis Mills, who is as close to a statue as the Bears will play all year.

“It’s not about the other team; it’s about us,” defensive end Al-Quadin Muhammad said. “They come in bunches.”

They haven’t yet. The Bears had two sacks in the first 39 minutes of their opener against the 49ers and four in the 141 minutes since.

“We need more [sacks],” coach Matt Eberflus said. ‘‘[They] can come from all levels. We need them to come from pressure players, safeties, linebackers, nickels and front. So it’s gotta come from everybody. Certainly we want our four-man rush to get going there and we will get that going, but we need to have some from other spots, as well.”

That’s probably bluster. Eberflus’ entire defensive structure is built around rushing the passer with four down linemen — and not a single rusher more. The Bears have blitzed on 7.3% of pass plays this season. Only the Bills have brought an extra rusher less often.

The Bears maintain that they’re capable of blitzing, but perhaps that’s merely to give the Giants something extra to worry about.

“I would like to think that we have some things in our back pocket that we haven’t shown that may come out at the proper time,” Williams said.

That could look like a blitz by linebacker Roquan Smith or slot cornerback Kyler Gordon. Don’t count on it, though.

“We should be able to stop the run and rush the quarterback with four men,” defensive line coach Travis Smith said. “That’s what, in the system, if you look at the history throughout the teams that have played a four-man front, that’s what the great ones do.”

Of the Bears’ six sacks, 5½ have come from defensive linemen. Trevis Gipson leads the team with two sacks, followed by rookie Dominique Robinson, who has 1½. Robert Quinn, who set the franchise sacks record last year with 18½, and defensive tackle Justin Jones have one apiece. Linebacker Roquan Smith shares one with Robinson. 

Smith said rushing the passer starts with putting teams in third-and-long situations by stopping the run. The Bears did that last week, holding the Texans to 3.8 yards per carry after allowing 5.1 in their first two games.

“To have a better control of the game on defense, we have to stop the run to try to make them one-dimensional,” said Quinn, who is questionable for the game against the Giants because of an illness. “Keep them from [making] us be on our heels. And that is, in a sense, a manhood type of thing.”

Now they have to get to Jones.

“We gotta keep pursuing, keep being relentless, and I think the results will turn up,” Gipson said. “We can’t get discouraged because of the amount of sacks we have.”

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