Michael C. Wright 9y

Changes inevitable for Chicago Bears

Hopefully, your Thanksgiving turkey went down smoother than the Chicago Bears' 34-17 loss Thursday to the Detroit Lions.

Let’s take a quick spin around the Chicago Bears beat:

-- ESPNChicago.com’s Jon Greenberg captures a scene of disappointment in the locker room after Chicago’s loss to the Detroit Lions. The Bears simply aren’t receiving return on their investment on the offensive side of the ball.

Greenberg writes: The future is going to be a hot debate over the next month, as the 5-7 Bears face three playoff contenders at home, including the Lions again, before finishing the season in what should be a frigid, unwatchable game at Minnesota.

Changes will be made for 2015, that's for sure. What they will be might depend on how the team comes down the stretch.

But the present is clear: The highly touted individual talent on offense doesn't equal team success. It sure doesn't add up to points. The Bears are averaging 21 points per game. That's truly embarrassing, considering the money allocated to that side of the ball and the hire of Marc Trestman.

"The talent we have on the team, we're definitely underachieving right now," Matt Forte said. "Some guys got to do some soul-searching for the rest of the season to plan on how they're going to play the rest of these games."

-- ESPNChicago.com’s Jeff Dickerson runs down the five things we learned in Chicago’s loss to the Lions.

--Matt Forte wasn’t happy about his role in the offense, and understandably so considering he carried just five times in the loss to the Lions.

-- Brad Biggs of the Chicago Tribune takes a look at the team’s continued ineptitude on offense.

Biggs writes: That gets us back to what has troubled the Bears most all season. Sure, Matthew Stafford sliced apart the secondary for 390 yards — 146 to Calvin Johnson — and the Lions rolled up 474 yards of offense but the most confounding and problematic aspect of the Bears remains rooted on the offensive side.

The Bears were supposed to win games with offense, not defense. Before you say the defense isn't keeping them in games, realize blowout losses have been just as much the result of offensive incompetence.

-- Rick Morrissey of the Chicago Sun-Times might be on to something here.

Morrissey writes: A fiction has risen up around the Bears. It says they are too talented to be flailing the way they have flailed most of this season. Subscribing to that fiction allows you to believe they should be better than they are. And once you believe that, you’re free to think they’re not that far from being competitive.

So why make changes, the thinking goes. Stay the course. Trust me, the Bears will, heading nowhere.

There’s no point anymore in calling for heads that aren’t going to roll. Not Phil Emery’s. Not Marc Trestman’s. Not Jay Cutler’s. The Bears have anesthetized everyone into surrender. Their fans might as well sleep the sleep of the dead, like their team. Ownership is not going to make significant changes.

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