Bears vs Bucs recap: Jay Cutler played awful and the Bears got embarrassed again

FINAL SCORE

Chicago Bears 10

Tampa Bay Bucs 36

The Chicago Bears looked great two weeks ago against the NFC North leading Minnesota Vikings, and with their Bye week coming last week, they had extra time to prepare for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Beating the Bucs wasn’t a guarantee, but many thought that Chicago would be able to pull off their second win in a row.

However, it didn’t take long on Sunday for everything to fall apart, yet again.

The game opened up with Jordan Howard running well between the tackles. The Bears knew they would likely have success in the running game, but for some reason Dowell Loggains decided to abandon the run early on, and called plays for Jay Cutler to throw down field.

Cutler had an extra zip on his passes early in the game, but early and often, the turnovers came. On a 3rd and 2 play, Loggains went empty backfield, put Cutler in shotgun, and called a pass play. Jay Cutler threw an awful pass that resulted in an interception. This was despite Jordan Howard having success running it up the gut.

A few minutes later, Cutler made another bad decision, and threw another interception, this time to Chris Conte, which ended up being a pick-6.

And a few minutes after that, Cutler fumbled the football after being chased down from behind, which was his third turnover in about 17 minutes.

Jay Cutler ended up with a quarterback rating of 55.1 (it was 39.4 before the final drive where he racked up some garbage time completions).

Loggains eventually went back to the running game, feeding Jordan Howard the football with regularity. But by that time, the game was getting out of hand.

The Bears defense played well early on, with their front 7 being aggressive, playing fast, and making plays, but eventually they gassed because the offense couldn’t stay on the field long enough to give them a break.

Kyle Long was lost to an ankle injury, which looked pretty bad. The Bears plugged in Ted Larson, who is not exactly a good fill in for Long. But he was all they had because Eric Kush was back on the inactives list.

While we’re talking injuries, Will Sutton was also knocked out with an ankle. More to come on that when we have more information.

It wasn’t all bad though.

The defense played well at times, led by Danny Trevathan, Jerrell Freeman, Willie Young, and Leonard Floyd.

The defense sacked Jameis Winston four times, and had him in their clinches twice that many times. Many times, including this one, that didn’t exactly turn out the way we’d hoped it would.

But when it was all said and done, Jay Cutler laid an egg, the coaching was suspect for yet another week, and the Bears reminded us of exactly who they are.

Cutler ended up with a 55.1 quarterback rating. Howard ended up with 100 yards rushing.

And we still have seven games left in the season.