In a 17-point loss loaded with painful body-blow moments, it was easily the haymaker that hurt the most.
And the Bears knew they were going to wind up and throw it, long before the opening bell.
Chicago’s first scoring drive covered 71 yards in just five plays, including an early 31-yard pass play from quarterback Caleb Williams to Colston Loveland and then a 35-yard touchdown strike to Rome Odunze.
After a Cowboys field goal and on their very next offensive snap, Bears head coach Ben Johnson went for it all.
The first-down flea-flicker started sloppy, with running back D’Andre Swift stopping and lobbing a dangerous floater of a ball back to Williams. The lack of any real pass rush by the Cowboys gave Williams ample time to wait for the ball to reach him and then re-load the cannon.
His pass traveled nearly 50 yards in the air and hit wide receiver Luther Burden in stride. The rookie already had Malik Hooker beaten by several steps, and the Cowboys safety could only make a diving try for Burden’s feet as he cruised into the end zone for a first-quarter dagger.
Through three games, the Cowboys defense has given up 15 explosive plays (20 yards or more), with Russell Wilson and the Giants racking up eight of them in their meeting last week. The Dallas secondary has now been burned by a bomb of 50-plus yards in every game this season.
Johnson admitted after the 31-14 win that it was a tendency he specifically sought to exploit as he went up against Dallas’s new defensive coordinator Matt Eberflus… who just happens to have been the head coach in Chicago before Johnson.
“I give the staff a lot of credit,” Johnson told the Chicago media in his postgame press conference. “They’re going through and they’re watching the tape and finding out things that may or may not fit, whether it was Dallas this year or some of the stuff we’re watching of Chicago’s defense from yesteryear [under Eberflus]. So that was really a staff find … We worked it all week and felt really comfortable calling it this week.”
Make no mistake; the word is out: the Cowboys are embarrassingly susceptible to deep-ball highlight-reel shots, and it’s- more precisely- a known flaw of the Eberflus system.
The unit wasn’t great in the season opener versus Philadelphia, and they’ve only gotten steadily worse since then. Just three weeks into the Schottenheimer era, there’s already a growing call for the team to fire Eberflus and hand the defensive reins to someone else.
While that seems very unlikely this early in the season, it does speak to just how vulnerable the defense has been, especially to big, explosive plays.
And with Jordan Love and the potent Packers offense about to step in the ring for a primetime fight in Week 4, finding some way to stop the bleeding simply has to be a priority for Eberflus and the Dallas defense this week.
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