My job finally ended today, so I was able to watch the game last night. Huzzah! Unfortunately, it went downhill from there. Let me run through my quick thoughts before we get to the good stuff:
1) Jay Cutler. First pick? On him. Second pick? Not so much. I took a look at it again (thank God for DVR) and it does look like there was some miscommunication between Cutler and Olsen.
Let's give Cutler some credit. He was able to make plays with his feet and he took some shots by staying in the pocket and waiting for plays to develop.
2) Our offensive line is awful. Seriously. God f****** awful. They made stupid plays at the absolute worse time. Orlando Pace = bad. Frank Omiyale = needs to leave. Chris Williams = somewhat bad. Regardless, we really need to get it figured out, because either Cutler will get killed or Forte will really turn into #3.
3) Look, Matt Forte may be partially bad because of our OL. At the same time, he's a very, very tentative runner this year. I have no idea why, but he's running scared this year. Even when he's in the open field, he looks scared. When Garrett Wolfe was in, he was hitting the hole quickly and making sure he's getting some sort of positive yardage. As soon as one defender shows up, Forte slows down. No idea why.
There are too many bad things to cover, so I'm not going to. Let's move on.
Lovie Smith on the game:
"We had a lot of opportunities to win the football game. You can't make those types of mistakes on the road against a good football team. When you have the ball in the red zone, you need to be able to get some points, and those turnovers really hurt us a lot. You've got to be able to put points on the board in those situations. Just like we've won with all three phases kicking in, everyone contributed to [the loss], starting with me. I have to do a better job. We all have to do a better job.
"Even with [all the miscues], we still put ourselves in position at the end to tie the game and have a chance to win the game and kind of self-destructed a little bit there. So, yeah, that is disappointing."
Lovie Smith on Forte's performance:
"It's like that sometimes. They're a good football team. They're a 4-1 team. They have a decent defense. You're not going to always be able to run the football against them. I thought we did some good things at times against them though."
Lovie Smith on Pisa's injury:
"Pisa went down with a knee injury; that's about all we know. He couldn't finish the football game. Of course there's concern when that happens."
Matt Forte on his performance:
"It's very frustrating. I can't turn the ball over and I turned the turned the ball over. I can't turn the ball over, and I turned the ball over ... twice. Can't do that. We definitely had multiple chances to put points on the board. We could've gotten at least a field goal out of the one I had. I can't turn the ball over, especially in the red zone."
Greg Olsen on the game:
"We just didn't make enough plays to win. We didn't play very well. It's a tough one the way it went down."
Orlando Pace on either being too fat or too lazy to hold himself together on one of the most crucial 4th downs of his career:
"Mistake on my part. Just got to fix it, get better and move on next week. As an offensive line, you got to pride yourself in getting that yard and getting into the end zone."
Lance Briggs on the game:
"For us, it was a game of missed opportunities. When you're ineffective defensively and offensively, you have to really go back to the drawing board and figure some things out. But when you are effective offensively and defensively and just miss some opportunities, then you're just kicking yourself."
Zack Bowman on the game:
"One of our focuses of the second quarter of the season is getting more turnovers. We talked about it again at halftime, and we came out and got two in the second half."
Adewale Ogunleye on the game:
"When you're on the road, you've got to play well. You've got to be consistent. We had too many opportunities to win the game and just didn't capitalize. Hats off go to the Atlanta Falcons. They deserved to win."