Chicago Bears looking for a few good flags called on opponents

Jacksonville has the next-worst penalty differential at a distant minus-21, and it's not close to the Bears because the Jaguars occasionally get the benefit of a flag. There are only three other teams with a double-digit differential besides the Bears and Jaguars: Kansas City and Tennessee at minus-12 and Buffalo at minus-11.

This huge differential in total has resulted in a penalty yardage differential of minus-279 yards for the Bears this season with 533 yards in penalties and only 254 yards walked off against opponents.

No one close to Bears

Again, no one else is even close, just like with the total flags. But the yardage figures are even more dramatic.

The next-worst gap is Denver at -142.

The average yardage differential between what’s called on the Bears and on their opponents is almost 2-to-1 compared not to the league average but to the NEXT CLOSEST NFL TEAM.

If you want to give social media an opportunity to erupt every Sunday, there you have it.

Opponents consistently ignored

If they had one or two games in there with a huge gap that skewed totals, it would be easy to understand. They have been penalized more times and for more yards than opponents in every one of their seven games, though.

Ben Johnson addressed their own false starts this week. They're piping in really loud music and crowd noise to help practice the situation they'll face Sunday and had meetings on the topic.

“We've talked about it with the players," Ben Johnson said. "We'll certainly make sure that, they understand – especially now that we lost a game and the penalties were a big culprit as to why we didn't have the success we wanted to. It really opens Pandora's Box up here where, ‘Hey, all hands on deck here.” We’ve got to get this thing fixed. We've been harping on it as a coaching staff and when it results in a loss, I think it just magnifies the issue that was at hand.”

Not so fast here, though. There were only two false starts Sunday and the Bears overcame one of those in the red zone. The other cost them only 2 yards because they were backed up on first down at their own 4. It merely meant they needed 12 yards for a first down and not 10.

False starts are pretty cut and dry, anyway. Even in the last game when Joe Thuney got flagged, it was obviously a false start if you looked at the full film from the correct angle. TV replay during the game didn't go back far enough or have the right angle to show when he moved.

However, it's the strange calls and lack of calls that keep creeping up in Bears games.

One-sided and strange

How Olamide Zaccheaus avoided a concussion Sunday on an obvious lowered helmet to his face after a catch in the open field is truly miraculous, as was the fact there was no Baltimore penalty. Look for a fine on Saturday for this from the league office, though kind of late to benefit the Bears.

Who was looking the other way when DeAndre Hopkins grabbed Nahshon Wright's facemask in the open field so he could get free to make a third-down catch that let the Ravens keep the ball with a seven-point lead and 3:18 remaining as they tried to keep the Bears from tying it?

The Bears, meanwhile, get their own share of penalties that are mysterious calls, like the offensive pass interference call on Colston Loveland against New Orleans.  

Offensive coordinator Declan Doyle said after talking to the league his teaching point from that play was they are still going to teach tight ends to do exactly what Loveland did. In other words, someone in a striped shirt fouled up and the league had to admit it.

This week it was Bear special teams coordinator Richard Hightower who wasn’t happy about two of the three penalties walked off against his group.

“What I saw when I watched the tape, I feel very confident in the way that we're coaching it and I feel pretty confident that we'll coach it the way we're coaching it going forward,” he said. “That's how I feel about that.”

A Detroit-Bears connection?

As infuriating as those were to the Bears, they would be the less common occurrences.

Situations like those with Zaccheaus and Wright, with opponents not penalized, are what's obviously lacking in Bears games. The lack of flags on opponents borders on alarming.

Maybe it all has something to do with the Detroit-Ben Johnson-Dan Campbell connection. Perhaps it causes officials to turn the blind eye to opponents in games. Lions opponents have even fewer flags called on them than Bears opponents (33 to 36). It's just that the Lions don’t have the huge differential because they don’t get penalized very often themselves.

At some point, you'd have to think the law of averages—or the law governing each game in striped shirts—works back in the other direction with more flags called on Bears opponents.

If it doesn’t happen soon, then expect conspiracy theorists to become all of those who believe the Bears' penalty differential is coincidental.