(670 The Score) With a defensive background, Bears head coach Matt Eberflus views it as his responsibility to ensure his team is as fundamentally sound as possible when it comes to tackling.
And he has a plan to make sure the Bears improve in the tackling department. It starts Wednesday at the Bears’ first practice, even though they can’t put on full pads for another week.
“First of all, the pads are so important,” Eberflus said on the Mully & Haugh Show on Wednesday morning. “You have to be pad-ready. So what we’ll have is these thud periods. So we’ll be playing the ball in the secondary, but once the guy catches it and takes a couple steps or a runner is just running the ball, we’re going to thud guys. So we’re going to hit them. We’re going to wrap them for a second and then we’re going to let them go. So it’s important that we put the top of our pads on guys and get pad-ready. That’s the big thing.
“And then to your question about tackling, the drill work we do, we give a lot of time to individual. And the drill work we do with the defensive guys is so important. We do a thing called a ‘hamstring tackle,’ which is a low tackle. And we’ve been teaching that since ’95. And it’s a really good tackle. It’s a way to knock a backwards or sideways and to really eliminate the hidden yards when it comes to football. So you get your second-and-8s and second-and-9s rather than that middle second-and-4 or second-and-3 when they run the ball on first down. So that’s an important piece to it, and it’s going to be up to our coaches and our players really paying attention to that so we’re a really good tackling team.”
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