The Chicago Bears plan to get back to pounding the football on the ground under offensive coordinator Adam Gase.
The biggest beneficiary will be Matt Forte, who is glad to be taking more handoffs a year after catching 102 passes.
"When you run the ball, it's more like an attack feeling," Forte said, per the Chicago Sun-Times. "They like smash-mouth football, where you can bloody somebody's nose and run and hit people."
"And then as a running back, you can get rhythm and kind of wear on defenses and wear them down, where that pass rush will be a lot less harder in the fourth quarter."
Consider games like the Thanksgiving debacle in Detroit when Forte had five carries and Jay Cutler passed 48 times as a thing of the past.
Forte's comments can be read as a critique of the Bears' offense under ex-coach Marc Trestman.
"Anybody who has watched film from last year or anybody who is a smart coach knows that we can't, especially being in Chicago, just throw the ball every down," Forte said. "We have to be balanced."
Still, it's not as if during Gase's two seasons as the Denver Broncos' offensive coordinator he emulated Vince Lombardi's ground-and-pound.
In 2013 the Broncos threw 675 passes, second-most in the NFL. In 2014 Denver threw 607 times, ninth. Of course, Gase had Peyton Manning then. Now he has Cutler.
Perhaps the coordinator also learned from the Broncos' stretch run last season, when he leaned on the run game after Manning was injured.
Now in Chicago, the plan appears to be to run the ball and minimize the chances Cutler has to make mistakes. That's a plan everyone, especially Forte, can get on board with.
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