Brass plays blind to bungling Bears

— -- LAKE FOREST, Ill. -- The one visual I will take away from Monday's first-half postmortem at Halas Hall is the nodding head of Chicago Bears coach Marc Trestman.

About a half-hour into a 42-minute conversation among Chicago reporters, Bears general manager Phil Emery and Trestman -- one that danced around fundamental problems and connected on hard truths -- Emery was answering a question about linebacker Shea McClellin and his odd fit as an NFL player.

Now, McClellin gets quite a beating around these parts, from opposing offenses, fans, reporters, you name it.

His muffler guy probably takes advantage of him. He's happily paid extra for undercoating.

But McClellin is Emery's initial first-round pick, and the Boise State product has been demoted from a pass-rushing defensive end to a guy posing as a starting strongside linebacker. Next stop is his own show on ESPN Boise.

McClellin is the face of institutional failure and a willful ignorance of the truth.

But here's Emery on his guy:

"The most difficult thing for Shea has been the two times he's started to roll -- he had the big game against Green Bay two years ago, a year ago, then he got hurt and never got rolling that way again," Emery said. "Had a good game against San Francisco, really finally figured out the play-action stuff, the reverse, the receivers running underneath the formation -- 'Hey, that means boot, I'm back.' He took away about three or four routes that game, he leveraged the run against the option well, then he breaks his hand.

"Comes back, has a rough game here at home. He did some good things yesterday, but he, like the other linebackers that are in there, struggled with Tom Brady's play-action. Right now, like all of us, he's our starting Sam 'backer right now, he's a 3-5 record-wise Sam 'backer, and he has to get better. And we all do."

It says something that Emery half-remembers a game McClellin had either a year or two years ago -- it was last November, when he knocked out Aaron Rodgers -- and as he talked about the "Shea McClellin Game" back in Santa Clara, California, Trestman nodded his head as if Emery was making the greatest point he had heard in weeks.

Talk about two guys grasping at straws.

Is there anyone outside of these guys, his position coach and McClellin's family who remembers his role in that game? Anyone who cares about a Week 2 game going into the Bears' Week 9 bye?

This is where the Bears' bosses are right now, spinning their wheels trying to defend players and concepts that simply are not working.

Emery and Trestman are clinging to the rebound the Bears showed after their opening-week home loss to Buffalo as proof this team has it in itself for a second-half surge.

But maybe that home loss to Buffalo when the now-benched (for Kyle Orton!) E.J. Manuel completed 72.7 percent of his passes is proof that this team has stunk from the start of training camp.

The Bears' three victories came on the road against a middling San Francisco 49ers team, the 1-7 New York Jets and the 2-6 Atlanta Falcons. They have no home victories. When a team has no home wins through the first half of a season, that's because it is not a good football team.

With the Bears foundering at 3-5, there is nothing Emery or Trestman can say to assuage their joint failure.

As for making a playoff run in the second half, I'm not sure there's anything they can do besides light candles and pray the rest of the NFC adopts the Bears' blueprint for failure.

The next time we see those two together will be when they're announcing the firing of scapegoats -- I mean assistant coaches -- following what's shaping up to be a 6-10 disaster.

Next up is Trestman. After that, Emery.

And then we'll have a new duo up there explaining how football works.

Halfway through this season, the Bears are good at almost nothing.

The offense is out of whack, or, to quote receiver Brandon Marshall, just plain wack.

Marshall is a tough dude, and I like a guy who speaks his mind because I'm a reporter. In fact, his new nickname should be the "Content Producer," because he's currently better at creating storylines than first downs.

Yes, Matt Forte can run the ball effectively, but if the team is rarely in the position to run, thanks to double-digit deficits, what's the point?

The defense is awful -- just not as awful as the second half of 2013 -- aside from a moderately productive line and a healthy rookie corner in  Kyle Fuller.

So why bother, right? No! You have to watch the film, as they say. Trestman sees potential where we see failures.

"Because it shows up that we can get it done," Trestman said. "These are things that are correctable, our ability to create some turnovers will help us. Our ability to match up better will help us. Our ability to ... spend the time this week, and I've seen this happen over time after a bye week, where teams find themselves."

Coaching jabber aside, that starts with Jay Cutler.

The NFL cognoscenti's favorite target is getting killed by national media and analysts for the same personality defects that have defined his career, while the real problem is that he remains too careless, too concerned with making something happen.

That's actually where Emery perfectly hit on the underlying problem with Cutler and why he'll never fit the Tom Brady quarterback archetype.

"Honestly, I've been watching him since he's from Vanderbilt," Emery said. "In the past, he was better than everybody around him. And when you're better than everybody around you, you're pressed to make plays. Coming out of Vanderbilt, some of his things from a technical standpoint were concerning, in terms of coming off the back foot, protecting the football. And a lot of that revolves around trying to make plays. And Jay, like a lot of players in that position, has a little bit of a gunslinger personality in terms of 'I wanna be the guy making the plays.' He trusts his arm. Those are habits. Habits are hard to improve."

Now, Emery counseled, Cutler has gotten much better at those bad habits since Trestman's arrival. But he's still a losing quarterback. Cutler has 12 turnovers, most in the NFL. All that progress from last year has abated. If Trestman can't tame Cutler, he's got one more year, tops.

But to be fair, it wasn't all Cutler's fault the Bears lost to New England 51-23 on Sunday.

The Bears' defense, racked with injuries and rife with incompetence, made Ryan Tannehill look like Brady in a Week 7 home loss to Miami. Then it made Brady look like some kind of gamma ray-transformed Hulk Brady in Foxborough, Massachusetts.

Trestman didn't quite make excuses for why tight end Rob Gronkowski tore up the secondary for nine catches (on nine targets), 149 yards and three touchdowns. Brady was in a real groove Sunday, but you can't just chalk up that kind of game to Brady's "meticulous throws" and Gronk's pure talent. That's on the defense, too.

"We played a significant amount of man-to-man coverage, we had very, very tight coverage," Trestman said. "If you look at Ryan Mundy's coverage on the corner route, it was right on his hip. Meticulous throw. If you look at the crossing route, [Chris] Conte was right in position, just missed, was right on his hip again and Gronk actually picked it up off the ground. So there were a number of extremely tight covered plays."

Yeah, that's what I thought watching Gronkowski run free like a psycho gazelle. "Boy, that was tight coverage!"

I'm not one of those people who equates what coaches and executives say in the media room to what they're saying behind closed doors. The Bears don't have enough talent to compete.

Who's at fault for that? Emery and Trestman. The players themselves. Cutler's coaches at Vanderbilt, I guess.

Trestman said the team will use the bye week as a busman's holiday as it prepares for Green Bay. Several players have implored their teammates to look within themselves to see if a winner exists.

But iPad play cut-ups and soul-searching might not be enough.

Forget the spin. Here's the truth: There are a host of plain bad teams every year in the NFL, and this year, the Bears are one of them.