Reacts: Bears confidence level and thoughts on the taunting rule

After the way in which Aaron Rodgers and the Green Bay Packers stomped the Chicago Bears comeback out in the fourth quarter last Sunday, I assumed our Reacts confidence poll numbers would take a drastic drop, but at 42% we’re still higher than we were after week’s 4 and 5.

There are currently 9 fanbases less confident in the direction of their team than our fans are, and those teams are as follows.

Denver Broncos - 3%
Houston Texans - 7%
New York Giants - 11%
Washington Football - 16%
Miami Dolphins - 17%
Philadelphia Eagles - 19%
Seattle Seahawks - 20%
Minnesota Vikings - 36%

I fear the Bears week 7 matchup in hot and humid Florida against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers could drop our confidence results even lower next week. Last I checked the Bucs are a 12 point favorite, so this one could get ugly.

Besides the weekly Bears question(s) that SB Nation Reacts sends out to us, we also get several broader and national questions, and there were two this week that I thought were interesting.

We were asked... Prior to this season, did the NFL have an issue with taunting?

Only 27% of Reacts’ respondents felt there was a taunting issue before this season, and I can’t recall any instances a year ago where games were marred by taunting. Unless we want to discuss what the Saints C.J. Gardner-Johnson did to draw a couple punches from Chicago wide outs.

The taunting rule has been all over the place this season, and I think refs have a hard enough time figuring out what a catch is and what pass interference is, so giving them a new rule to think about is ridiculous.

We were also asked... Is the taunting rule being applied equitably?

And across all 32 fan bases we overwhelmingly voted that it isn’t, with 80% of us checking the no box. Getting someone’s face and berating them after a big play could be considered a taunt, spinning the ball in the general direction of a player should not be.

Former Bears defensive assistant and now Chargers head coach Brandon Staley had some thoughts on the rule.

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Bears’ fans, SB Nation Reacts is a neat way share your voice with fans across the NFL with their fun and topical surveys. Each week they’ll shoot out some questions to our plugged-in fanbase, both about the Bears and the other 31 teams too, and we’ll share the results here on Windy City Gridiron. Sign up here to join Reacts.