(Written by kencraw)

Anybody who’s watched a fair amount of football knows how important the run game is.  You generally can count me among its strongest proponents.  So I was happy to read this BearTalk post about how the Bears intend to run better this year.  That is until I got to this perplexing line:

they ran for just 103 yards per game against their first six FBS foes, then hiked that to an average of nearly 184 yards over the final five games.

That sounds good to the untrained observer.  How can improvement over the course of the year be bad, right?  But for those of us who actually remember how last season went, the Bears went 3-3 in their first 6 FBS games but only 1-4 in their last 5.  Sure seems like running more resulted in more losing.

So then I dug into it on a per-game basis.  Perhaps hiding in the above numbers was some clarity:

Wins:

• Northwestern: 114
• Colorado: 127
• Washington State: 62
• Oregon State: 269

Close Loses

• Arizona: 193
• UCLA: 56
• BYU: 173

Larger loses:

• Washington: 64
• Oregon: 193
• USC: 105
• Stanford: 179

Uh, not really.  The Bears won and lost close running for 62 and 56 yards, their lowest two totals of the season and lost big with their 2nd highest total of 193 (Oregon).  They also lost close with the exact same number of yards (Arizona).

There’s not much way around it statistically.  The Bears ability to win last year had very little to do with their ability to run (at least statistically).  It’s far more tied to whether they could pass:

Wins:

• Northwestern: 300
• Colorado: 458
• Washington State: 527
• Oregon State: 277

Close Loses

• Arizona: 380
• UCLA: 310
• BYU: 393

Larger loses:

• Washington: 304
• Oregon: 367
• USC: 279
• Stanford: 231

If the Bears passed for more than 310 or so, they gave themselves a good shot to win (OSU being the outlier).  However in the 4 large loses, they only got over that number once and 2 or their 3 worst passing performances were in that bucket.

So maybe for this offense, it’s just not keyed on the run game.

Thoughts?