Shane Waldron gets points for his adjustment but needs early results

Coming into this season, Shane Waldron looked like the new John Shoop, Terry Shea or Luke Getsy because the Bears’ offense started the season the way it starts most games. However, that has changed since the win over the Rams capped their current three-game winning streak.

Waldron’s offense has yet to score a touchdown on its first drive but continues to finish games strong.

Matt Eberflus found this and other reasons to applaud Waldron during Monday’s press conference.

The double-screen fake and throw to Cole Kmet earned Waldron a lot of national respect for his creativity after the Bears’ early offensive efforts had the opposite effect. Even Eberflus, defensive coach that he is, loved the game.

“Well, I liked the fact that we had explosives there,” Eberflus said. “We stuck to the running game. So we stayed true to this goal. This is important to ensure balance in this league. Because you can’t become one-dimensional one way or the other.”

“I also think the explosive plays and some creativity, the creative plays. Cole (pass) in the middle, I think that was really creative. I like the way they responded to adversity when we got the penalty for two players moving, I think it was third-and-9 at the time. The play calling there was really good compared to where we were on the field.

That was Williams’ third-and-9 back-shoulder throw to Keenan Allen for a touchdown.

“There’s a lot of good there,” Eberflus said. “We had a good flow of the game, the offensive team is doing a really good job of supporting a lot of those ideas and the execution at the positions.”

“But yeah, I thought he had a really good game.”

The slow starts remain a sore point, but it beats finishing strong in the NFL and there’s no denying that. Too many games come down to the last two minutes to doubt that.

After the Colts game, Waldron’s meeting with offensive leaders caused a great stir, and one of the topics raised was the need for their offensive game plan to include a series of plays early on along the lines of the 49ers’ famous 15 plays of the Bill Walsh era. NFL Network’s Stacey Dales reported on this lack of plays last week during the team’s stay in the London area.

Eberflus admits some of the validity of such comments or reports.

“Yeah, I don’t know if that’s entirely right,” he said. “I mean, we always have openers that we practice and that’s a big part of it. So we have several games listed as openers.”

“So opening plays are plays that you use on first and second down, and then of course you transition to your third down script based on the yardage. Pretty much everyone does that.”

It’s more about organizing these pieces, said Eberflus. But it sounded exactly like what was reported about the meeting, as it had to be a series of scripted pieces.

“It was just more of a communication with the leadership of the offense with Shane and I to be able to get those (scripts) in order,” Eberflus said. “So we put that in the right order so guys knew exactly what Play 1 was, Play 2 and so on, and what the first third-down plays were, and that’s kind of how they worked.”

As Dales reported, it certainly sounded like a scripted situation. And Eberflus underlined the importance.

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“Guys can practice it, they can rehearse it in their head,” he said. “You can obviously rehearse it from the walk-throughs before the game and just put them in the right order so that’s pretty much it.”

“But here, too, it’s all about good communication. Guys work together to find the right answer. Not necessarily your answer. But it will always be the right answer for the group.”

The group approach and scripted game semantics are fine, but the real need is to get more productivity out of the game’s first few rides.

The Bears are 0-6 in scoring touchdowns on their first few drives, even after they had their little meeting and asked for scripted plays. They rank 30th in the NFL in first quarter scoring averages of 1.7 per first quarter.

However, they are second in the NFL in fourth quarter scoring at 9.5 points per game. All of this from an offense that ranked 24th in the league and 22nd in the league in passing.

As Waldron pointed out, it’s largely true in the NFL that you can’t lose a game in the first quarter, but you can definitely win in the fourth quarter. If you had to make a choice, the fourth quarter is more important.

On the other hand, if you had your druthers, a few more points early and especially on the first drive can make those 9.5 points per fourth quarter that much more effective.

Twitter: BearsOnSI