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Good morning and happy gameday, and another week of an enthralling game between two one-win teams.
So there really isn’t a whole lot to lead in with about the Jaguars. They’re 1-3 coming off the bye, their running game has been particularly atrocious (Blake Bortles is over a quarter of their team rushing yards) and Bortles as a passer has been... erratic, though coming off a two touchdown, no interception performance against the Colts as the Jaguars put up 30.
So after last week, I kind of have to ask - do you like offense? Especially offense where you get a lot of yards? Over the last two weeks the Bears have put together 930 total yards of offense, including nearly 700 (!) of that in the air through a ferocious Brian Hoyer passing attack (things you’d think we’d never say at week 6 this year), performances that have pushed the Bears to the 8th overall offense by yardage.
Really a shame that yards mean nothing when you’re 30th in points scored per game. Of the 5 teams that have fewer total points, only the Texans and Rams have played 5 games and the Chiefs, Jaguars and Seahawks are all within 6 points of the Bears’ 85. (Yes, that means the Jaguars have a higher points-scored-per-game than the Bears. Deal with it.)
So what are some of the immediate causes of this lack of points? Well, drives stall out as the team gets further down the field coupled with a guy that has a kicking accuracy this year about as high as Jason Heyward’s batting average. The Bears have a #1 receiver who may as well be wearing a cloaking device and a starting running back with 5.8 YPC... who has 39 carries in the last two weeks against two pretty spectacularly awful defenses.
I mean, really you hope that this week is when Hoyer finally notices that Alshon Jeffery is actually a better receiver than Cameron Meredith and is also a bigger red zone target, because it doesn’t help when the drive stalls around the 30.
If it makes you feel better though, the Jaguars’ defense (and, as usually is the case in these numeric scenarios, killer turnovers) has been the equivalent of the Bears’ offense, if that makes sense - they’re 7th in yards allowed per game but 26th in points allowed. So there may be some opportunities for a unit that’s trying to develop some playmaking to get moving against the Bortles-led offense. Looking at you, Jacoby Glenn.
At the least, it should be entertaining. Let’s get to the linkage.
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BEARS VS. JAGUARS PREVIEWS
Week 6 Preview (Sam) | Everything You Need To Know (Dane) | Five Questions (Jeff) | Injury Report (Les) | WCG Predicts (STAFF)
Roster Analysis
Brian Hoyer is Josh McCown (Les - Podcast) | Fuller To Safety (Robert) | Jeffery on Martellus (Robert)
Around the League
Week 6 Fantasy Football (Jeff) | NFC North Review (Robert) | Ken’s “I Watch The Games” Power Rankings (Ken) | Power Rankings Roundup (Les)
Josh looked at the Bears’ injury woes to see just how rough the team has it.
Jack did an awesome retrospective on the 2006 Comeback against the Cardinals.
Procedures today are the typical things for a noon game. We’ll have the first quarter thread go live right at noon central time, with subsequent threads popping up as the game goes on. After the game we’ll have our quick recap as well as our late slate threads, and in the morning we’ll have the Monday Den and Notes to go deeper into the game.
All that being said, with the propers out of the way, Bear Down.
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So at this point your morning entertainment is still up in the air, but you will have some variety of morning entertainment. The reason being that Dane will be on Facebook Live today!
When Dane goes live with that, we’ll go ahead and embed it up in here and you can throw some questions and comments at him either here or over on the WCG Facebook site. (Please like our site!)
And if things go south for us on that, you’ll see the familiar Twitch window appear below, but we didn’t want two live sources going at the same time to just make unintelligible garble sounds.