Bears locker room shocked at Aidan Hutchinson’s third quarter penalty

CHICAGO — “I don’t know how you can jump right there.”

Those were the words of Cole Kmet and the sentiment Chicago Bears locker room following their 28-13 win over the Detroit Lions on Sunday at Soldier Field. With 1:42 left in the third quarter, the game was tied at 13-13 and it was 4th and 13 for the Bears on Detroit’s 38 yard line. According to Kmet, the Bears had no intention of snapping the ball at all due to the situation.

Normally in such situations, the quarterback goes with a hard count in an attempt to draw the defense offsides, and once unsuccessful, they’ll go with the original plan, usually punting or kicking a field goal.

Well, that didn’t happen this time.

Instead, Lions defensive end Aidan Hutchinson bit on the count, jumping offsides in the process. Knowing he had a free play, Bears quarterback Justin Fields launched it 38-yards, connecting with wide receiver DJ Moore for the go-ahead touchdown to retake a 19-13 lead.

When asked about his shock level on a scale of 1-10 regarding the play, Kmet stated that it was at an 11, feeling that Hutchinson’s penalty was a rookie mistake. “If they do jump, we all know what we’re getting to,” Kmet said. “But yeah, it was 4th and 13 around the 50. That’s kind of like prime take a delay. You know what I mean?”

“I couldn’t believe it, but we took advantage, so good deal for us.”

Fields himself was stunned and visibly satisfied after learning from Kmet in the Bears locker room that it was Hutchinson who caused the error. Afterward, Fields went to the post game media room and broke down the play from his perspective. Fields said there was no trickery involved in selling the play against the Lions, as he said that most teams know that it’s coming, so they he and his team treated it like a normal play.

“Yeah, I mean, basically we were just lined up in a formation, and we tried to just get them to jump offsides,” Fields said. “Just one-on-one and did a dummy protection adjustment to make it feel like a real play, and of course the second one we got somebody to jump.

At that point you want to convert because I think it was 4th and 12? That’s only a five-yard penalty. Did a great job of front protecting. I think Tev (Jenkins) did a great job selling it and stuff like that and DJ ran the ball hard. We practice that each and every week, so it was great execution by everyone.”

Bears offensive line Braxton Jones backed Fields’ claims, stating that he and his fellow offensive lineman, Teven Jenkins, were intentionally theatrical in hopes of getting the Lions to bite on the cadence. He also doubled down on the notion that there was no intention to run a play at that point.

“That’s kind of what you want to do, run something like that when you don’t necessarily want to snap the ball or anything, you just kind of want to get ‘em to believe that we’re going to snap the ball.” Jones stated that he immediately noticed Hutchinson jumping offsides and went right into the standard procedure, as he knew Fields was going right Moore for the free play.