The Bears offense is incomplete.

“If you want to have success in the NFL, you’re always going to have to be a threat to stretch the defense vertically,” quarterback Justin Fields said. “So you have to take shots downfield, so [the defense is] not all up in your grill.”

It’s not enough to attempt them, though. The Bears actually have to start completing them.

Fields threw four passes beyond 20 yards in the air in Sunday’s 49-29 loss to the Cowboys — and all four were incomplete. He was 1-for-2 against the Patriots, 2-for-5 against the Commanders and 1-for-4 against the Vikings.

The Bears already can attack a defense sideline to sideline with their run game and the passes they throw based off of them. Now they need to stretch it end zone to end zone.

“You’ve got play-action pass, you’ve got movement passes that are out of pocket–you stretch the horizontal part of the field,” head coach Matt Eberflus said Monday. “But I think it’s important that you stretch the vertical part. Not only on the sides by the numbers, but the middle part.”

Fields is getting his chances. The Bears are successful on 68% of their pass block attempts according to ESPN’s team pass block win rate metric, ranking third in the NFL. Nonetheless, the Bears are tied for last in the NFL with 634 air yards, which measures how far a pass traveled before being caught. Only 54.8% of Fields throws have been on target, which is the worst number in the NFL.

Sunday, one deep ball incompletion was his fault. Another plainly was not.

On the Bears’ first offensive play, Fields took a shotgun snap, faked a handoff right to running back David Montgomery and looked deep right for Equanimeous St. Brown. The receiver had cornerback Anthony Brown beat by four yards, Eberflus estimated, but Fields left the throw short. It fell incomplete.

“We gotta let that air out,” Eberflus said. “[Fields] knows that. … Just a little under-thrown on that one.”

St. Brown slowed down to try for the catch, but probably could have flailed more and hoped for a defensive pass interference penalty.

“Certainly that’s some gamesmanship,” Eberflus said. “We let the guys use their instincts on that.”

St. Brown had a touchdown in his hands later in the game. When the Cowboys jumped offside with 20 seconds left in the first half, Fields knew he had a free play and launched a ball to the front right pylon. St. Brown leaped for the ball with both hands but Brown helped poke it away.

“That was a wonderful throw,” Eberflus said. “I’ve been saying it all along, he’s a wonderful deep ball thrower. He can put it on a dime, drop it in the bucket, whatever metaphor you want to use. He certainly had a couple of good ones there.”

The other came when, with 2:45 to play in the first half, receiver Velus Jones split wide and beat Brown down the right sideline. Fields launched the ball 54 yards in the air, and it landed in both of the rookie’s hands at the 4. Jones, who has muffed two punts this season, dropped it as he fell to the ground.

“He worked himself open all the way down the field, and that ball was on the money,” Eberflus said.

One of the benefits of the Bears’ successful run game is the mismatches they can get deep down the field. It hasn’t produced success. Of the nine passing quadrants beyond the line of scrimmage — to the left, right and middle from 0-10 yards, 11-20 and 20-plus — Fields has a passer rating above league average on only two.

Fixing that is the next step.

“It would be a big help rounding out the offense,” running back Khalil Herbert said.

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When Roy Curry was coaching football at Robeson, he would sometimes let an assistant run practice when he went to scout future opponents.

The assistant was Lexie Spurlock.

“I would always leave and I knew the team was in good hands,” Curry said Monday.

Spurlock later took over as head coach at Morgan Park, and that program was in good hands as well.

One of the most successful and most respected football coaches in Public League history, Spurlock died on Friday. He was 76.

Over a 16-year span from 1995 to 2010, Spurlock guided the Mustangs to 12 IHSA playoff berths and a 137-59 record. They reached the Class 7A semifinals in 2004, and advanced to the quarterfinals in 2003, ’06 and ’07. Morgan Park also won the 2007 Prep Bowl.

“He was a great disciplinarian and a hard worker,” Curry said. “When he took over Morgan Park, everything elevated. I thought maybe two of those teams should have gone downstate.”

Mickey Pruitt, who went on to play for the Bears and Cowboys and now is Deputy Director of Sports Administration for Chicago Public Schools, was coached by Spurlock in track and football at Robeson. They also were fraternity brothers.

“He was fun to be coached by,” Pruitt said. “He had a good, good spirit with him. … A coach that people really liked.”

Current Morgan Park coach and alum Chris James talked about Spurlock after the Mustangs’ IHSA playoff win over Fenwick on Saturday.

“We were expecting it, but when it happened it was still hard,” James said. “It was tough on me [Friday] and [Saturday]. It wasn’t about football, it was everything he did for us and how close we felt to him.”

James said Spurlock was following this year’s Morgan Park team, which is 9-1 and among the Class 5A favorites.

“I would text him after games and we talked a lot,” James said.

“I just wanted to make him proud. He always told me I didn’t have to make him proud, just do things the Morgan Park way. That has always been my entire mission, to get back to where he had us as a program.”

That was at the top of the Public League pecking order.

“There was a time where he was the top coach in the city and he had the top teams in the city,” Curry said.

“We were really close to winning a state championship,” James said. “So I want to bring that to the school but I also wanted to do the things that he did as far as building men.

“That was his thing. And it wasn’t a democracy, it was a dictatorship.”

Contributing: Michael O’Brien

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Roquan Smith is now a Baltimore Ravens linebacker

A franchise that had the famous linebacker compared to Roquan Smith this offseason is now getting the All-Pro player. Chicago Bears fans were talking themselves into eating an insane future contract to keep Smith. He was compared to Ray Lewis for having 300 tackles for loss and  30 tackles for loss in a two-year span. According to a report by Ian Rapoport, Smith was traded to the Baltimore Ravens for a second and fifth-round draft pick Monday afternoon.

It was reported that the Bears wanted two first-round picks for the two-time holdout linebacker amid a contract year without an agent representing him. Smith’s God-awful performance in Dallas didn’t help general manager Ryan Poles leverage. The stat packer was the second lowest-rated Bears defender by Pro Football Focus in Week 8 against the Dallas Cowboys. Smith was rated 28.5 overall in the game for being about as bad in coverage as he was at stopping the run. And Roquan Smith gave up a touchdown on a missed tackle in the running game.

Poles made absolute magic out of this trade. Bears fans should be asking him to do David Montgomery next.

Bears fans react to the trade on Twitter

Bears fans didn’t seem too excited to lose one of the franchise’s best off-the-ball linebackers in franchise history.

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With less than 9% of the NBA’s regular season in the books, it’s too early to call sample sizes full-grown trends.

Especially when it comes to a Bulls team that counted on “continuity” to be the standard in which they close the gap in the Eastern Conference when offseason roster decisions were made, but instead have been dealt a cruel hand of inconsistency in that department.

Starting point guard Lonzo Ball? A late-September knee surgery with an ongoing wait-and-see for a re-evaluation.

Max contract Zach LaVine? A knee management program that has the two-time All-Star a part-time regular both in games and practices.

The defense? Great in quarters two and three, while very suspect when it comes to starting and finishing games.

As DeMar DeRozan pointed out, it’s only that third one that his locker room has control over.

“It just hasn’t been good enough, especially at the start of games,” DeRozan said of the defense. “We’ve got to come out more aggressive, and not let teams get comfortable. We have too much indecision. We’ve got to take out the indecision once they hit a couple shots. We’ve got to make them do something else.”

DeRozan was very right about one thing: Opposing teams are operating way too comfortably against the Bulls.

While DeRozan & Co. are only giving up 113.1 points per game [15th in the NBA], they are allowing 24th in field goal percentage at 47.8% and 28th in three-point percentage at 43.2%.

A healthy Ball will help that when — and if — he returns at some point this season, but the LaVine situation is proving to be much trickier. Defense is about communicating and repetition, especially when the focus of that defense is on a backcourt playing a disruptive style like coach Billy Donovan expects.

That’s hard to do when LaVine is operating under restrictions.

The LaVine the Bulls saw play a tenacious brand of defense with Team USA in the 2021 summer and into the first six weeks of last season is gone. Or at least on sabbatical for a time.

LaVine’s defensive rating in the 2019-20 season was a career-best 110.4. He was well on his way to breaking that early last season, and then the left knee started to betray him. By the end of the 2021-22 campaign, he finished with a career-worst rating of 116.1.

Through the four games he’s played in this season, he sits at 114.6, which is still over his career average of 113.7.

Brass tacks? The Bulls maxed LaVine at five years, $215 million with the hope that he would stay an elite scorer, as well as continue inching his way to being more of a two-way player. At least in Year 1 of the deal, that’s very unlikely.

That doesn’t mean that executive vice president of basketball operations Arturas Karnisovas shouldn’t sleep well at night.

His bench additions of Goran Dragic and Andre Drummond have resulted in a bigger impact than expected.

Dragic has proven to be the tip of the spear for the “Bench Mob II,” leading the team in plus/minus with a plus-31. Considering he’s done that in just 17.4 minutes per game is what’s been remarkable.

Drummond, who was still dealing with a shoulder issue as of Monday, hasn’t been far off, tied for second in plus/minus with Alex Caruso at plus-29, while averaging 16.8 minutes per game.

But the most important stat that Karnisovas can embrace? Two of the three wins his team currently has.

In beating Miami and Boston — both expected to be playoff teams — the Bulls at least showed some life against the East’s elite.

Last season, it was a combined 1-14 record against Miami, Boston, Philadelphia and Milwaukee. It’s 2-1 so far this season, and the Bulls had the 76ers on the ropes Saturday night.

Just a meaningless sample size? The Bulls hope not.

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Contrary to what most might figure, Blackhawks general manager Kyle Davidson isn’t looking at the current NHL standings and cringing.

Sure, even he is slightly surprised to see the Hawks sitting third place in the Central Division entering Monday, having earned 10 points from their first nine games. But he stands by what he insisted at the start of training camp, that he actually does want them to win. Seeing them actually do that isn’t changing his mind.

“I feel really great for [coach Luke Richardson] and the staff,” Davidson told the Sun-Times. “They set out with a plan, based on the type of players we brought in, and it has been really impressive. The players have responded. They’re competing hard every night and playing a really strong team game.

“Having a coach that can deliver a message is extremely important, and that’s what we’re seeing. Winning helps him…build a culture, and that’s very positive. You take positives where you can find them, and this is a big one.”

It’s worth noting the Hawks have fallen back below actual .500 — with four wins and five losses — after squandering third-period leads in three straight outings. Their 42.9% team scoring-chance ratio at five-on-five, which ranks 29th in the league, isn’t great either.

Nonetheless, where it actually counts, they’re still playing at a 91-point pace. That entered Monday tied for 14th in the NHL; it would’ve been 19th last year.

They’ve scored 31 goals and allowed 30. They’ve suffered only one loss by multiple goals, and that was in the season opener; only the Golden Knights (with zero) have suffered fewer. Their special teams look legitimately dangerous: they rank fourth in net power-play conversion rate and 10th in net penalty-kill rate. And their goaltending has held up well: their .903 team save percentage ranks 15th.

These Hawks may not be world-beaters or even playoff contenders, but they are undeniably competitive. That competitiveness has been so consistent — on a nightly basis over a sizable nine-game sample — that it no longer seems fluky.

‘We’re at the point now where we’re pretty confident in our game,” Patrick Kane said Saturday. “[We] feel like we can go into any game and compete and win.”

That’s a dramatically different attitude than teams like the Sharks (3-8-0 with a minus-10 goal differential), Coyotes (2-5-1, minus-12) and Ducks (2-6-1, minus-19) are currently emanating. And that’s bad news for the Hawks’ unstated-yet-obvious initial objective to land a top-three pick in next summer’s draft, which will only be guaranteed if they finish dead last.

But Davidson maintains he’s unconcerned. Asked how he’d respond if the Hawks kept this up into the winter and spring — his options would range from jettisoning players (to undermine the success) to pivoting and bringing in more depth (leaning into the success) — he took the middle route.

“I don’t think we’re going to change our course at all,” he said. “We’ll see where we’re at and go from there. How we handle it, we’ll see, but we’ll get there first.”

Thinking long-term, Richardson’s stellar first few months as an NHL head coach justify cheer without caveats.

The Hawks hired Richardson hoping he’d remain their coach not only through the rebuild but also into the next era of contention. If he can get this much out of a roster this weak, it’s exciting to imagine where he could take an actually talented, well-constructed team years from now.

“He has been phenomenal,” Davidson said. “Coming in new on the job, you don’t fully know what to expect, but I was very optimistic he would be able to do some positive things. Through the interview process, we had a really good feeling about him… It has come to fruition that our instincts were right.”

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In a shocking move, the Bears are trading linebacker Roquan Smith to the Ravens.

The Bears are getting a second-round pick and a fifth-rounder in return, per a source.

Smith, the team’s best player, is in the final year of his contract. The Bears, though, could have controlled him through the 2024 season by giving him the franchise tag next year and then doing so again.

The linebacker conducted a “hold-in” at the start of the season after he and new general manager Ryan Poles couldn’t hammer out a contract extension. He then demanded a trade, issuing a public statement that said the first-year GM was not negotiating in good faith.

Smith backed off his demand, eventually returning to preseason practices. He said he would focus on the season instead of a new deal. Smith leads the NFL with 83 tackles and was one of the team’s four captains.

“I feel like I’m in the same head space that I was back when I asked [for a trade] — and that was declined,” Smith said last week. “I shift my focus to just being the best guy I can to the guys in the locker room. The best guy to myself and to the loyal fans.”

The trade marks the second-straight big name player that Poles has shipped out of Halas Hall in five days. After trading Robert Quinn, another captain, to the Eagles on Wednesday, Poles listed Smith as one of the leaders could help fill the void on the defensive side of the ball.

Now Smith is gone, too.

Poles’ decision to move him makes it official: he doesn’t feel an inherent obligation to keep players from the Ryan Pace regime. Poles drafted Smith, a Butkus Award-winning linebacker at Georgia, with the eighth overall pick in 2018. He held out during his first-year training camp while his agent argued for protections against how his contract would be affected by the NFL’s new on-field penalty rules. He returned midway through camp but was still limited when the Bears opened the season against the season against the Packers.

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