Bernstein: Bears are 'full speed ahead'

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00:00The message I got yesterday from all of it, the vibe that I got yesterday, full speed ahead,

00:06full speed ahead. This is when, as all this is coming, they have every opportunity to tell us

00:13to slow our roll. They have every opportunity to start shaving off the expectations a little bit,

00:21tamping things down, not tampering, and just making us feel like, okay, let's not get ahead

00:27of ourselves. But they're not doing that, and I love it. The overwhelming impression that I got

00:33when I was taking notes on the press conferences was professional. Everyone sounded professional.

00:40It wasn't necessarily some celebration of culture, for example, like we keep hearing. There was a

00:46description of loving football. That will happen. But when it came to addressing setbacks, like I

00:52think Jonah Jackson did, or talking about being surprised that he was coming here like Joe Tooney

00:58did, or what you heard from Ryan Poles and Ben Johnson about how they are going to apply their

01:02skills and what they saw in them, everything was just very professional in a way that makes you

01:09understand that the expectation is different. You can just tell. You tell when you hear people talk

01:14about it the way they did. But overall, it just sounds like a team that was already,

01:19given who they've hired, a little more buttoned up than everything that we knew about last year.

01:24Tighter.

01:25Right.

01:25Everything is just a little tighter.

01:29More mission critical, if you will. I don't have a real job, so I'm leaning on real job people to

01:35kind of help us here, drilling down and such.

01:37Mission focused, yeah.

01:38But they really did sound like people who you could already tell were more aligned toward a

01:45common goal and a common understanding. The mentions of the coaching staff by players,

01:51talking about how that encouraged them. We saw even an example in Dallas when Jack Sanborn's

01:56playing for Matty Rufloos again, but knowing that these guys are excited about playing for this team

02:05and why, and mentioning the coaching staff the way they did, how many times did you hear players say

02:09that? It's the opposite.