The Chicago Bears changed out Matt Eberflus for Dennis Allen as the man calling defensive plays this offseason. Both men run a base 4-3 defense, with 4 defensive linemen and 3 linebackers, but their defensive styles are quite different. Today, I want to dig into the data to see what we can expect to see stay the same or change quite a bit compared to Chicago’s 2024 defense.

Personnel

Let’s start with a basic look at how many players from each position are on the field each snap. The table below shows that data for both the New Orleans Saints and the Bears across the 2023 and 2024 seasons (data from Pro Football Reference ).

A few thoughts:

Let’s start with the one clear similarity: both coordinators like to pull a DT off the field and replace it with a DE roughly 20% of the time

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