A few of you and I do mean a "few" have challenged the perspective fans have of Chris Conte, admittedly I am one of them. So I did what any average Bears fan would do and watched every defensive snap of the Chicago Bears in the 2013 regular season. After hours of football with no sound my wife may have summed it up the best, "are you insane?" I was not really sure how to answer her when I thought about it. Anyhow, here we are fresh after hours of watching Chris Conte.
Chris Conte Stats at The Bears Website (This will open in the same window unless you right click and choose another option)
Personally I think they sold him short on tackles but I probably missed a lot of plays that ended in a flag being thrown. That being said, I am a big fan of the tackle that ends in a pop and this is not Conte at all. He tackles how you are taught by wrapping up the legs or just tripping someone up. He made about 80% of the tackles he attempted leaving his miss tackle rate just below 20%. This was actually a lot better than I originally thought it would be. He excels at coverage and only really had a handful of plays he was off on. Without knowing what plays were called I actually only saw him totally screw up coverage completely once, unfortunately that one hurt like a Refrigerator Perry landing on you.
Overall it looked like 30% of the plays that had him as the only thing between the apposing team and a TD resulted in a TD. Missed tackles and close but not close enough coverage made up at least half of these. Some of the 30% are him being fast enough to get to someone else’s mistake just in time to take blame. Once I subtract goal line stands, which he is not half bad at, and plays that were probably not in his area of responsibility his failure rate was probably just above 20%, slightly higher than his missed tackle percentage.
If he had better hands and had that one play back against Green Bay he would have had a pretty good year. After going through all of these games I think he was actually slightly above average as a safety. His strength however is not moving up to stop the run and they made him do that way too much last year.