Mike Tanier

Our job this week is simple: fix the Chicago Bears offense.

The Bears rank 23^rd in in yards per game, though they are not as good as their totals suggest. They have allowed 18 sacks, the league's third highest total. Their drives are sputtering progressions of penalties and sacks, tied together by the occasional long run by Matt Forte or hot-read pass by Jay Cutler.

This offense needs serious repair. Coordinator Mike Martz isn’t up to the task. Nor is offensive line coach Mike Tice. But we can do the job. First, we must establish two important ground rules:

1. No blaming Jay Cutler
His role so far this season has been to deliver the ball before getting buried alive by pass rushers, and he has done a fine job.

2. No complaining about the run-pass ratio
It was horrible in the Packers game, when Matt Forte got just nine carries, but Forte had 25 carries against the Panthers and 22 carries on Monday night. No Martz team is going to start running like Vince Lombardi’s Packers, and 20-25 carries should be enough to feature Forte and keep the defense honest. Our goal is to make Forte and Cutler work smarter, not harder.

Here is the gameplan:

Offensive linemen are not playing cards
Tice shuffles linemen the way a Vegas croupier shuffles at the blackjack table, preventing the Bears from establishing any continuity up front.

Video   PFT Live: Playoffs up for grabs in NFC Oct. 12, 2011: With five teams sitting at 2-3 in the NFC, the sixth seed is up for grabs at this point in the season.

Some of the changes had to be made. Rookie right tackle Gabe Carimi suffered a knee injury in Week 2 and guard Chris Spencer injured his hand in Week 4. But other moves have been motion for the sake of motion. Lance Louis, who has all of the stopping power of the “Watch for Children” sign on the side of an ice cream truck, inexplicably won the starting right guard job to start the season. Spencer took over when Louis suffered a minor injury. Louis then replaced Frank Omiyale (Carimi’s replacement) at right tackle when Omiyale was benched against the Panthers. Omiyale got his starting job back, only to lose it again against the Lions, with Louis again taking over at right tackle and Edwin Williams sliding in at right guard.

Got that?

Let’s straighten things out for the Bears. Spencer is a career center, Roberto Garza a career guard, so naturally Garza is playing center and Spencer guard for reasons that probably make perfect sense to Tice. Let’s flip them as soon as Spencer is healthy enough to return to action. Get Carimi back into the lineup as soon as he is available. In the meantime, we will make do with Omiyale, who started 28 games in the last two seasons, giving him as much additional help from the tight end as we can.

Louis will make a great crossing guard near a neighborhood elementary school.

Once we get every lineman in place, we must make sure they stay there, at least until the ball is snapped.

The snap count and other advanced math
The Bears have been called for a whopping 17 false starts. Omiyale and left tackle J’Marcus Webb have committed five each. The rest are scattered around the offense, with skill position players doing their part to get a head start before the ball is snapped: tight end Kellen Davis has committed two false starts, Forte and Devin Hester one each. Not surprisingly, most of the false starts came in two dome road games against opponents with dangerous pass rushes; the Saints game in Week Two and Monday night’s flag festival against the Lions.

I watched replays of all of the Bears' false starts. (This job is wall-to-wall glamour). Some of them, particularly Webb’s, are the result of a lineman trying to get back into pass protection quickly by anticipating the quarterback’s cadence. That will happen from time to time, though the Bears can minimize the problem by focusing on their silent count in practice.

Mike Ehrmann / Getty Images The Week in Sports Pictures The nation grieved for those hurt, killed and affected by the Boston Marathon bombings. After one of the suspects was caught on Friday — following a day-long lockdown and manhunt — sports returned to Boston over the weekend.

Other false starts may take care of themselves. Omiyale appears to be marching to his own tune at times, popping up like a jack-in-the-box long before any other lineman has budged. He is a veteran who should know better, and if he doesn’t figure it out, Carimi will. A few of the penalties are the result of Martz getting too fancy; Hester flinched on an elaborate Wildcat play that featured Forte at quarterback.

Eliminating those false starts must be top priority. The Bears lead the NFL with 10 plays of 1^st-and-more-than-10.  They also lead the league in plays of 2^nd-and more-than-10: 21 runs, four passes, and a doomed scramble in which Cutler lost 13 yards. For a team with pass protection problems anyway, false starts create a vicious cycle — the Bears are forced to the air on early downs, which causes more pass pressure, which digs a deeper hole.