(670 The Score) A debacle on a game-deciding Hail Mary on Sunday has led to introspection from the Bears and an audit or sorts regarding what they need to clean up internally in their preparation for games.
After tight end Cole Kmet noted that Bears players didn’t “respect the game” enough before and during their 18-15 loss to the Commanders on Sunday, star cornerback Jaylon Johnson agreed with Kmet’s assessment and expanded upon it in an interview with the Spiegel & Holmes Show on Monday evening.
“Cole ain’t never lied,” Johnson said. “I mean, that’s the truth, honestly. At the end of the day, there’s definitely times for us – of course, we’re never going to do everything 100% correct, nobody is going to be perfect – but I definitely felt like there are times really top to bottom that we’re not either detailed enough or detailing the right stuff. Guys, I would say, not locked in to their assignments. We’re not redoing plays or we’re kind of, if somebody messes up, we’re not correcting it in that moment. Like you said, respecting the game, being detailed, giving a damn enough to really just do things the right way – and I think there’s plenty of things for us to either do or the things that we are doing, do better. It will, like he said, really just plant the right seeds for us to go out there and win and play winning football. And I think for us too, it’s like, yeah, it’s big, it’s big on process and big on doing things the right way. But at the end of the day, what I’ve been saying is it matters what we do on Sunday. And we can be locked in. We’ve been locked in on the … Hail Mary play – we’ve done got in position, we’ve done and detailed it, but we didn’t do it on Sunday. So it’s like, yeah we can say that, but we didn’t execute when Sunday hit.
“At the end of the day, we need to do things better, have a better operation throughout the week, a better way of detailing things. At the end of the day, we’ve got to take that from practice into the game and ultimately make the plays we need to make to win the games that we need to win.”
Listen to Johnson’s full interview on the YouTube video at the top of this story.