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Dug into the lineup data to see how Bears used their TEs yesterday. Not going to focus too much on efficiency because it's a lot of small sample sizes, more on what they tried to do.
Bears had 3 TEs on the field for 11 snaps yesterday, and threw it on 7 of those. Looks like they were trying to catch the defense thinking run and exploit that.
They had 10 plays with 2 TEs, and ran it 8 times. That's about what you'd expect for a jumbo package.
They had 10 plays with 2 TEs, and ran it 8 times. That's about what you'd expect for a jumbo package.
They had only 1 TE on the field for the other 44 snaps (mostly Graham with 34 of those). Only ran it on 10 of those snaps, though I don't know how much of that is due to needing to throw in the 4th quarter (data is only available for full game).
My biggest takeaway is how many snaps we saw with 2+ TEs. It was about 1/3 of the snaps yesterday, and I'm guessing closer to 40 or 50% before they went to almost exclusive 1 TE sets while having to air it out during the late comeback.
Bears only had 2+ TEs on the field for 108 snaps last year. They're on pace to hit that in only 5 weeks this year. That's a massive shift in the offensive approach. It puts them more in line with what KC did last year; they had 2+ TEs on the field for ~400 snaps (25/week).
Again, I'm not going to dig into the effectiveness of those different lineups yet, because the sample sizes are too small, which makes them skewed by 1-2 plays (either good or bad). I'll take a closer look at that after maybe a month or so.
To illustrate what I mean by one play skewing the results: the 34 plays with Jimmy Graham as the only TE on the field look like they were pretty inefficient passing, but that's largely because of the 28 yard sack/fumble.
And those Graham as the only TE formations have great running stats, but that's because of the Trubisky scramble + 15 yard penalty (1 of 10 runs in these looks, ~50% of the yards). One play in each that had nothing to do with Graham completely skews the results.
Slight correction here: Bears had 139 snaps with 2+ TEs on the field last year. Still massively lower than that number will be this year. https://twitter.com/Johnathan_Wood1/status/1305594247681277952?s=20
