Bears vs Vikings week 6 – Adrian Peterson dominates.

I’ve spent the first part of this season asking myself, “Why would you ever kick to Devin Hester ?” It seems to defy all logic, but teams seem to just keep gambling on it. In this game, I think the question would be “Why did we kick to Adrian Peterson ?” We basically gave him a bullet and played our own game of Russian Roulette, and paid the price. Of course they also needed a 55 yard field goal as well, but the return made it all possible.

As much as I’d like to believe that we should have won that game, I truly believe that the best thing we had going for us is that the Vikings didn’t run Adrian Peterson more. They ran Chester Taylor 23 times, so it’s like they wasted 23 bullets and Adrian Peterson only needed 20 to get 221 yards and 3 TD’s.

It’s a shame that Devin Hester’s heroics went to waste, he had another great game and is now making a large impact on the offense. I also saw alot of positive things about our offense in this game. They seem like they now have the will to comeback, which is something they didn’t seem to have with Rex Grossman. I think anyone who would contend that moving to Griese as our starter was a mistake is delusional. Griese is doing his fair share of making things happen on offense. He seems to do a bit more touch passing than Grossman did, which is kind of scary when you see the higher arc on the ball on some of the short passes. The longer the ball is in the air on short passes, usually means the more chance there is for someone to defend. But so far, Griese has done it in the right situations and placed them effectively. 381 yards of passing ain’t too shabby.

My one gripe is — Why did we abandon the run in the second half ? Even before we needed to, we started slipping back into our primary attack being passing. I though Benson had a very good first half. I also think that our running game set up the long pass. Even though the DB slipped, it’s just nice to be getting single coverage on your #1 receiver, and that comes from effectively running the ball. But hey.. who notices that kind of thing anymore ? Certainly not Turner, who decided that we needed to pass more in the second half. The longer Peterson sat on the bench, the better in my opinion. Why not run some clock and get their defense tired ? Oh well, it was Adrian Peterson’s game, we were all just there to watch.