Vic Fangio left to coach the Denver Broncos and took cornerback Bryce Callahan and assistant coach Ed Donatell with him. Adrian Amos joined the Packers in free agency. There are a lot of reasons to expect some amount of regression from the Bears' defense this season. It almost seems like a certainty.
Quarterback Mitch Trubisky had a solid season but showed plenty of inconsistency last year. Is the book out on the third-year player?
Coach Matt Nagy is fresh off of a successful rookie campaign in which he led Chicago to a 12-4 record and NFC North title. But there's talk about if this team can repeat that success this season, for the reasons listed above and then some.
So Nagy sent a message to his team. And it stuck with at least one player.
“What we got from it is that it’s really up to us,” said defensive tackle Akiem Hicks. “It’s up to us to decide, whether or not we want to be as dominant as we were last year. We can go as high as – and this is going to sound cliché – we can go as high as we want to go. We can be as dominant as we want to be. It’s just a matter of us taking the time out of everything else and sacrificing to make our team and our defense and our offense one of the best to play this game.”
It can be easy, even human nature, to take it easy after a successful season. But Nagy is going to make sure his team stays hungry.
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