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Alshon Jeffery, Brandon Marshall Are Keys To Chicago Bears’ Week 12 Win

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Brandon Marshall Alshon Jeffery Chicago Bears

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It’s time for the Chicago Bears‘ offense to wake up.

There are so many things wrong with the Bears this season that it’s made for great debate for fans who want to vent. Some want to blame Jay Cutler, some want to blame the defense and some are on Marc Trestman; the truth is they are all to blame.

The fact is, fans knew the defense was going to struggle and most thought Mel Tucker wasn’t the right man to lead the defense, so the overall statistics that the defense has allowed this year are not too surprising. What is surprising is the Bears offense. The thought was that even in games where the defense struggled, the offense was going to be able to go toe-to-toe with anybody and maybe the Bears would win a game 41-38. That hasn’t been the case.

The Chicago offense is yet to crack 30 points on the season, something that many thought would happen regularly in 2014. The Bears are 19th in the NFL in scoring, averaging only 21.5 points per game. We haven’t seen many dynamic plays from the offense and at times the play-calling has been quite conservative and more consistent with what was seen under Lovie Smith.

The aforementioned Smith brings his new team, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, into Soldier Field on Sunday in hopes of beating the team that terminated him in 2012. I’m confident that this game means a lot to Smith, but he would never say so publicly. One thing we know about Lovie is that he is never wavers in his game plans. He wants the game to be won defensively, he wants the running game to be shut down and he wants to create turnovers.

After Trestman intelligently fed Matt Forte the ball throughout the Minnesota Vikings game, Smith is going to key on Forte and try and limit his effectiveness. The coach is going to force Cutler to put the ball in the air and hope he can force the turnover-prone quarterback to be just that.

Cutler will probably turn the ball over once or twice, although I doubt anything more than that, and he is going to throw for plenty of yards. Cutler needs to play well, but he doesn’t need to have his game of the year for the Bears to win this game. The key to this game is going to be the Bears’ receivers.

In the Bears’ previous victory against the Vikings, Alshon Jeffery and Brandon Marshall combined for 18 catches, 225 yards and three touchdowns. This was the type of production the Bears expected out of their receiving corps on a regular basis, but it just hasn’t happened so far this season.

It’s only the second time this season that those two have combined for over 200 yards in one game, and it’s the first time they did so with one of them finding the end zone. This duo was supposed to be the most dangerous in the NFL this year, and they simply haven’t been. If the Bears want to stay on track and win for the second consecutive time, they are going to need their offense to produce like it was expected to at the beginning of the season. The key to that is having big games from Jeffery and Marshall.

Bill Zimmerman is a Chicago Bears writer for www.RantSports.Com. Follow him on Twitter, like him on Facebook, or add him to your network on Google.

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