Bears' Offense to Combine Elements of Multiple Systems

Stop me if you've heard this before.

"Marc and I have a history together back with the Oakland Raiders and we had a lot of success there and obviously the New Orleans offense has been very successful lately," Kromer said Thursday at Halas Hall.

"It will be a combination of a lot of things, and you don't want an offense to get stagnant, so you are constantly researching and finding new things that you can add to your offense to make it better and more versatile."

That's Aaron Kromer on Thursday, as posted over at the Bears' team site.

"We don’t want them to lock in on us, you know," Bears offensive coordinator Mike Tice said. "That’s why we were pretty vanilla last week, and we’re gonna be pretty vanilla this week (against the Washington Redskins on Saturday). When you’re vanilla like we’re gonna be in the preseason, you’ve got to execute better because we’re not gonna go out there and expose what Indianapolis is trying to figure out right now with who and what we are."

That's former offensive coordinator Mike Tice last season in the preseason.

Here's my "problem," I guess you could call it. When the Bears tabbed Mike Tice as offensive coordinator, he didn't exactly have a true "system" if you will. Just a promise that there would be lots of big, explosive plays, however they got out on the field. What the Bears ended up with was a big play offense that started out extremely boom or extremely bust, then gradually got less and less aggressive with a few big play attempts thrown in here or there. That's fine and all, but the end result was an extremely inconsistent offense.

The more I hear about Marc Trestman, the more I like about him and his fit as the Bears' coach. But here we are again with the "Do what will work" philosophy - I'm all in favor of doing what works, don't get me wrong, if the Bears are doing what works then that means they're scoring points. But I'm curious - if the Bears get into a crucial third and eight, let's say, and trailing by 7 late in the fourth, what do they go to in order to pick up a mandatory first down?

I think I understand coachspeak, I really do. I mean, after years of Lovie (or any coach in the NFL, for that matter) you just get used to it. But I'll be really excited when coachspeak becomes reality.

Tice's coachspeak didn't really translate to on-the-field results. The Bears need to hope Marc Trestman and Aaron Kromer's does.