Chicago Bears Sackwatch 2020: Week 4 vs Indianapolis Colts

It wasn’t the cleanest game from the Chicago Bears pass protection, but they escaped with only allowing one sack and five quarterback hits to the Indianapolis Colts, which was the toughest defense they faced this year. In Indy’s previous three games their defense had 9 sacks and 18 QB hits, so all things considered it could have been much worse.

This week’s sack allowed looked like a no-brainer on the live watch, and my thoughts didn’t change at all watching the replay.

Here’s how I had it this week.

Sack 8 - 3rd Quarter 12:50 - Justin Houston
Even at 31-years old, Justin Houston is one of the better edge rushers in the game today. He has 93 sacks in 122 career games since being a third-round pick of the Chiefs back in 2011. He has a full tool box of pass rush moves, so I wasn’t surprised to see him do this to Charles Leno Jr.

Leno overset to stop an outside rush and left the door open for a quick inside move. I went back and watched all the previous Colt pass rushes against Leno before allowing this sack, and each one was either a bull-rush or an outside move. Leno simply got beat on this one to something he wasn’t expecting.

I liked the play action design by pulling center Cody Whitehair to help sell the run, but the fake was too quick and didn’t fool anyone, and then Whitehair got caught flat footed after pulling. I’d like to see Whitehair engage with the defensive end instead of settling into a pass protection set. He’s not used to pass blocking out on the edge, so treating this like a kick-out block would have had better results.

But back to Leno; considering it was a play action pass, he should have been prepared for Houston reading run and going inside. Houston lined up pretty wide on this play, so if he was peeking in the backfield and saw the running back showing handoff, his move would have been to dart inside.

2020 Individual Sackwatch after week 4:

Sacks Happen - 2
Mitchell Trubisky - 2
Charles Leno Jr. - 1
Bobby Massie - 1
Cody Whitehair - 1
Jimmy Graham - .5
James Daniels - .5

Here’s how the Sackwatch has looked through the years.

2010 - 18 Martz
2011 - 15 Martz
2012 - 13 Tice
2013 - 6 Trestman
2014 - 8 Trestman
2015 - 9 Gase
2016 - 11 Loggians
2017 - 8 Loggains
2018 - 10 Nagy
2019 - 9 Nagy
2020 - 8 Nagy