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Chicago Bears: Why sacks aren’t the key to stopping Nick Foles

By Erik Lambert

Photo by Will Newton/Getty Images
Photo by Will Newton/Getty Images /
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The Philadelphia Eagles are coming in with all sorts of confidence that Nick Foles will be able to handle the Chicago Bears. It’s not hard to understand why.

The “backup” QB has had the hot hand with this team ever since late last season when he won them the Super Bowl. During that stretch, he shredded some pretty good defenses along the way including the Minnesota Vikings, who were #1 overall in 2017. So what’s the secret? It’s not like he was that great before. I decided to go digging for answers on the subject.

The common answer people will reach for in these matters is pass rush. Teams just haven’t gotten to him enough. The Eagles offensive line is one of the best in the NFL regarding pass protection. In six starts last year, Foles was never sacked in a game more than twice. That must be it, right? Not exactly. Twice in 2018, he’s been sacked three times. He had passer ratings of 98.8 and 102.3 in those games.

Upon going deeper I made a rather interesting discovery. Historically, Foles is never all that phased by lots of pressure. In his career, the veteran has been sacked three times or more in a game 13 times. Across those 13 games, he has completed 60.70% of his passes for 3,482 yards, 20 touchdowns, and 10 interceptions. That’s good for an 88.2 passer rating. That’s pretty solid for a guy in situations where he’s frequently pressured.

So is that it? Is there no secret to making “Big Game Nick” human again? Well, not exactly.

Chicago Bears secondary, not the pass rush, is key to stopping Foles

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Something did stick out from that list of games he had against frequent pressure. The bad games all had something in common. Low completion percentages. So I went back through Foles’ entire career as a starter and changed up the search criteria. This time I looked at games where he completed fewer than 60% of his passes in a game. The result? Far more encouraging. All told he threw for 2,665 yards, eight touchdowns, and 17 interceptions in 14 games.

That results in a 56.54 passer rating. What does this reveal? Simple. Foles is a rhythmic quarterback. The more completions he’s able to string together, the more confident he becomes. As his confidence rises, so does his accuracy. That means it won’t be the Bears pass rush that determines how good of a game he’ll have. It’s their secondary.

Kyle Fuller, Prince Amukamara, Eddie Jackson, and Adrian Amos have been phenomenal all season. Easily the most underrated secondary in the NFL which now features two All-Pros. Thanks to them, opponents are completing just 61.30% of their passes on average this year, good for 3rd-best in the NFL. The last four games they’ve played went as follows:

Two of those games were against current Pro Bowlers and the other two were played without Jackson in the lineup. He should play on Sunday barring complications with his injured ankle. If those guys can cloud the passing lanes and make it difficult for Foles to get easy completions on Sunday, the likelihood goes up considerably that he won’t have a profound impact on the outcome of the game. Not in a positive way, anyway.

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