The "Cover Who?" Defense

Lovie Smith, in the many years he’s coached in Chicago sans quarterback, has always been fond of saying, “We get off the bus running the football.” Sadly, now his teams don’t even seem to get off the bus at all. Once again, they didn’t show up on Sunday, this time against rival and divisional foe Minnesota. If you can’t get a team up for one of your divisional rivals, what can you get them up for?

Smith is an ardent supporter and believer in the Cover Two defensive scheme. Once again, with mass confusion in the secondary and linebacking corps on play after play, the look of confusion on the faces of his defense may be best summed up as the Cover Who?

Lovie Smith has been exposed. The only questions left are: Does Bears management understand this? And if so, what will they do about it?

Smith came to Chicago in the infancy of the popularity of the Cover Two defense. Back then it was known as the Tampa Two and was run by Smith successfully in Tampa Bay and in St. Louis. The Bears got a hot commodity in Smith and during the hey-day of the Cover 2 scheme, he was a great coach. The problem is that if you give innovative coaches enough time and let personnel men get enough players in their systems to defeat a certain defense, it will fail.

Quarterbacks learn tendencies. Coaches find weaknesses. Eventually, every scheme becomes beatable. The Cover Two baffled Brett Favre for a long time, but not anymore judging by the Vikings almost 550 yards of total offense in the game Sunday against the Bears. Smith has been exposed as a one-trick pony. His blitz packages rarely find holes, his base scheme is exposed and undermanned and what changes has he made?

None.

He sticks to the scheme. He believes in it. He knows it can work and doesn’t understand why it would stop working. Square peg, meet round hole. After every embarrassing loss Smith gives the same old tired refrain. He’ll look at the tape and make improvements and hopefully this will help us get better. What adjustments has he made though? What has he actively done to right the many wrongs? Nothing.

The problem is that Smith isn’t and never has been an innovator. He took what he learned in Tampa Bay under Tony Dungy and applied it as the Rams defensive coordinator. That team’s success got him hired as the Bears coach and he applied the same formula to this team. It hasn’t all been failure, obviously. Smith’s defenses have been dominant during his tenure, but he is, was and always will be a system coach. When defensive coordinator Ron Rivera wanted to change things, add his own imprint to the defense, Smith fought him. Under Rivera, who actually did manage to get his players to the quarterback when he blitzed, the defense was able to remain near the top in the league. Rivera mixed up blitz packages and other defensive looks along with the Cover Two. Smith didn’t like that though. Even though the Defense was successful under Rivera, Smith sent him packing and placed his friend Bob Babich in his place.

It’s been all down hill since then. Smith and Babich and this year’s new guru Rod Marinelli (who didn’t win a single game last year with Detroit but was suddenly supposed to be the answer to the Bears defensive problems) are all system guys. They are all Cover Two guys. They are all former Tampa Two guys. None of them were innovators. They are all replicators, and they are replicating a beaten horse.

The question now is will Smith overhaul his staff again and allow fresh thinking and new ideas into the mix? Will he hire an innovator to coordinate the defense under him, or will he insist on trying to beat teams of the Twenty-Tens with a defense from the Nineties?
The problem with surrounding yourself with yes-men is that if you aren’t challenged, you get stale. Lovie is stale. His defense is stale. Yesterday’s news, yesterday’s scheme, and yesterday’s coach—the world is made up of the quick and the dead. It doesn’t take an innovator to figure out which the Bears and Smith might be.