Since WCG is sick and in bed, I’m doing the game wrap up this week. Right now, I’m not going to go through the game point by point and explain what happened. I’m really too frustrated for that. Not only that, but judging from how many posts we had on the game threads, a lot of us saw the game.
Here’s what I do know to be true:
- The Bears offensive play calling (until 5:00 left in the 4th quarter) was horrid. We barely touched the TE’s until late in the game.
- Defensively, we played soft football for most of the day. There were a few moments when we played smash-mouth defense, but mostly it was soft.
- Hester is coming into his own as a receiver. He’s still very much struggling with returning.
- Why are we continuing to call McKie’s number? We’re essentially giving the opposing defense a down. Turner gives it to McKie, then gives it to Forte. It's not like we hide it.
Bottom line is that we shouldn’t have been in this game. We didn’t deserve to. Our defense played without emotion, there was absolutely no offensive creativity, and we constantly put ourselves in positions we shouldn’t have.
We can question whether or not we should have squib-kicked, why we played such a soft defense the last drive, etc. etc. We can blame the loss on Lovie, Bob, Ron, Ditka, Jesus, injuries, and whoever/whatever else we want to, but WE DID NOT DESERVE TO WIN. We played like crap today, and the score should have been a lot to a little in favor of the Falcons.
Matt Ryan played great today against our ‘tough’ defense. Give him credit. He threw for 301 yards with a TD and had our defense on its heels for most of the game.