The Chicago Bears had a massively disappointing 2019 season. After going 12-4 and winning the NFC North in 2018, they went just 8-8 and came in third place in 2019.
Of course, that also meant the Bears did not make the playoffs.
With that drop-off, there was disappointing individual play as well. Quite a few Bears players that had breakout seasons in 2018 seemed to take a pretty big step back in 2019.
One of those players was running back Tarik Cohen. He came into the year as a new star in the NFL, but was an afterthought most of the season.
According to Josh Alper of ProFootballTalk.com, Cohen spoke out on the frustrations of a disappointing season for himself and the Bears.
“It was very frustrating not having the season I thought I was going to have,” Cohen said. “I thought I was destined for a crazy year and, during the season, it was real frustrating. I thought it got to me mentally. Looking back at it, it’s going to do nothing but motivate me for this year coming up because I’m only going to look at myself. I don’t look at any other factors out there. I feel like how I play is always determined by me at the end of the day, so I feel like I got things to work on in the off season”
2018 was a major year for Cohen. He set new highs in carries (99), rushing yards (444), rushing touchdowns (3), yards per carry (4.5), receptions (71), receiving yards (725) and receiving touchdowns (5).
That is just about as much of a “breakout” season as you can have. 2019 saw a bunch of dips for the Bears back, though.
Cohen set a new mark for receptions in 2019 with 79. Everything else dipped, though. He had 213 yards and no touchdowns on 64 carries (3.3 yards per carry). Meanwhile, he had just 456 receiving yards and two touchdowns through the air.
His yards per reception went down from 10.2 to 5.8 — that's a crazy drop-off.
In Cohen's defense, the entire Bears team struggled. It's not crazy that his stats suffered, as defenses started to zero-in on him, teams were not really worried about little else offensively.
Still, the numbers do not lie and Cohen had a bad year in 2019. He seems ready to flip the script in 2020 though.
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