Coming off a brutal loss to the Kansas City Chiefs when the Bears scored only three points and failed miserably in the red zone, the natural instinct might be to pull back with quarterback Caleb Hanie.
That would fly in the face of what offensive coordinator Mike Martz believes in. He’s ready to give Hanie more with Jay Cutler’s fill-in preparing for this third career start on Sunday at Denver.
“I think we tried to mix all that in there with different protections and based on what we’ve seen out of the defense we tried to really adjust to what we’re seeing so they don’t zero on a protection,” Martz said. “We were in empty with five and six, eight, those kinds of numbers in the protection. What it comes down to, we just didn’t coach real good. We did not play as well as we should have in that game.
“To say it’s one thing or the other, it’s a combination of a lot of things. Some of the three- and five-step drop stuff, we weren’t as sharp as we needed to be. We want to make sure we are very careful with how many seven steps we do have in there but against a man team like that you want to let your guys shake free too, so there is a time for it too.”
“He did a lot of good things in that game,” Martz said. “We all – and coaches – all of us participated in that thing. I don’t think he is any different than any of our coaches on offense or players so he did some really good things in there and he’s making progress and I am encouraged by a lot of things in there. When you go back and look at that, there’s reasons for everything that happened. He’s not making mental errors, he’s sharp with everything so he’s learning under the gun so to speak.
“We’ve got to get him into the game a little bit earlier, probably a little bit still too conservative with him. He’s capable of probably more than what we’re doing with him. So, we’ll be a little bit more aggressive with him.”
