One of the most athletic "big" linebackers in the history of the league, Brian Urlacher's combination of size (6'4 258), speed (4.6), hands, coordination and pretty much everything else in his toolbox leaves his game unmatched in today's NFL.

A highly versatile college "player", Urlacher saw time at as many as eight positions while at New Mexico, including kick/punt returner and tight end, but his main designation was "Lobo" (hybrid safety/linebacker). The Bears had no intention of using him on offense or as a kick returner when they drafted him 9th overall in 2000, but they knew that they were getting an incredibly versatile athlete who could dominate for years once he was allowed to focus on one position.

As a rookie in '00, Brian Urlacher was named the starting SLB going into training camp. His work on the strongside lasted only two games before he replaced MLB Barry Minter during week three and the rest is history...literally. Moving Urlacher to the middle turned out to be a pretty good decision as he went on to shatter the Bears rookie record for tackles in a season with 123 total (97 solo) while picking up eight sacks and two interceptions, a performance which earned him the NFL Defensive Rookie of the Year award. He followed up his outstanding rookie campaign with another decent year in 2001: Helping lead the Bears to a 13-3 record with the leagues #2 rush defense (82.1 yards per game), NFL All-Pro, Defensive Player of the Year award and fifth in the leagues MVP voting. Not bad for a sophomore slump. The song remained the same in 2002 as he broke Dick Butkus' team record for tackles with 152 (116 solo), earned All-Pro honors once again and was the leader in fan voting for the Pro Bowl. As a team, the Bears fell off a cliff at 4-12, but Brian Urlacher was on top of the world.

Enter 2003. While the Bears still stunk as a team, finishing 7-9 with the leagues 16th ranked run defense (116.6 yards per game), we finally saw Urlacher stumble a bit. He set career lows across the board (87 solo tackles, 2.5 sacks, 0 INT) and failed to record a single turnover (INT, ff, fr). Like many star players, Urlacher seemed to try too hard when things went south, overrunning plays and making incorrect reads. Combined with the loss of his beefy teammates up front (Ted Washington was in New England and Keith Traylor played an ineffective 10 games) it's easy to see how Urlacher would fail to live up to expectations.

Should we expect a return to form in 2004? Lovie Smith has taken over as the Bears new head coach, bringing along a new defensive philosophy with him. Over the last few years the Bears have relied on their defensive tackles up front to tie up blockers, freeing up the linebackers to make plays. Smith doesn't believe in sacrificing players to protect his linebackers, rather emphasizing speed and upfield rush from his defensive line. While Urlacher doesn't have the protection that he's had in the past, this is considered a "linebacker friendly" system with the responsibility falling onto the shoulders of his star linebacker and his ability to get to the ball. Lovie believes that Urlacher should flourish in this system with his speed and athletic ability, posting a minimum of three sacks and three interceptions with a shot at five of each.

Positives

• Four year average of 97 solo tackles with 21 sacks and six interceptions. Near unmatched fantasy production when he's on top of his game.



• Urlacher has an incredible combination of skills. Size, speed, instincts...seemingly the prototypical linebacker.



• Lovie Smith's "linebacker friendly" system should help Urlacher return to form among the leagues elite, turning last year into an aberration. He's a big time playmaker who fills up the boxscore and he should find the opportunity to do just that in '04.
  

Negatives

• Urlacher is coming off of his worst year as a professional, entering a season with a new head coach/defensive scheme. The change may be beneficial but the transition always includes risk. Lovie Smith sounds very optimistic, but the fact remains that they are taking away Urlacher's beef/protection up front.



• The development of Lance Briggs alongside Urlacher may eat into his numbers a bit. Taking over the weakside spot vacated by Warrick Holdman, Briggs also has a nice blend of size/speed/athleticism and has been impressive in camp to this point.

Final Thoughts

Speed, Intensity, Power, Determination. Those are the terms used to describe Brian Urlacher on his official website. He's heard all of the criticism and knows that he's coming off a subpar campaign. He also knows that he needs to play much better for Lovie Smith's defense to work as planned, showing the sideline-to-sideline playmaking ability that turned him into one of the leagues brightest stars. He'll be 26 when the season opens, entering his prime and returning to his perch atop both the NFL and fantasy worlds. A return to the top five is much more likely than a repeat performance as the 30th ranked LB.

Aaron Rudnicki's Thoughts

Brian Urlacher has pretty much been a stud MLB since entering the league in 2000. He's now gone to 3 straight Pro Bowls and was considered by most to be the most valuable IDP player last offseason. However, his numbers suffered in 2003 and so did his reputation as the next in a long line of great Chicago MLBs (Butkus, Singletary, Urlacher). So, what exactly was the problem? One popular theory has it that pre-2003, the Bears often had some big bodied DTs up front like Ted Washington and Keith Traylor to tie up blockers and allow Urlacher to use his great speed to make plays all over the field. The problem with that theory is that neither Washington nor Traylor played in Chicago in 2000, and Washington only played in 2 games in 2002 when Urlacher set the Bears record for most tackles in a season. A related theory is that opposing teams simply figured out a way to neutralize Urlacher in 2003. He really demonstrated a lot of difficulty shedding blocks and was consistently taken out of plays as a result. It is rather unclear why this weakness wasn't apparent before, but generally speaking teams may have been trying to run away from him in the past whereas in 2003 they decided to run right at him. His speed makes him dangerous in pursuit, but when locked up with a FB or lineman, he can have trouble disengaging despite being a pretty big and strong guy. A final theory was that he was simply distracted because of issues in his personal life; I believe he went through a separation with his wife and was also rumored to be dating Paris Hilton for some time before allegedly reconciling with his wife. We'll never know if any of that impacted his play or if there were some other unknown reasons, but some red flags were definitely raised on Urlacher last year that are worth considering.

The Bears have changed coaching staffs and new coach Lovie Smith plans to implement a cover-2 system similar to the ones used in Tampa and Indy. Lovie's defense places a huge emphasis on speed, and he has said that instead of looking for big, fat, space eaters at DT, he wants lean, quick, athletic guys who can shoot the gap and make plays. The Bears drafted exactly those kinds of 1-gap DTs with their first 2 picks this year, however, it remains to be seen how much having that type of player will influence Urlacher's production. One thing Lovie has been adamant about is that he believes his system will help return Urlacher to prominence as one of the game's elite LBs, and he has said he expects him to end up with at least 5 sacks and 5 INTs. Those are some lofty goals, but not really all that unrealistic and I think its likely Urlacher has a rebound season of sorts.

Positives

• He's an athletic freak of nature, a college safety who blew up once he reached the pros but kept his great speed. He's blessed with great size (6'4", 258 lbs) and his skills are somewhat reminiscent of a young Junior Seau, as he can freelance and make plays from sideline to sideline.



• Has a coach who wants him to put up big numbers - the fact that Lovie expects 5 sacks and 5 INTs from him means there is a good chance the coaches will work to implement a system that takes advantage of his abilities and he'll be given plenty of opportunities to make plays.



• Youth: Despite having already played 4 full seasons, he's only 26 years old and is just starting to reach his prime. That alone is a good reason to expect him to continue to develop as a player.

Negatives

• Despite being one of the better blitzing LBs early in his career, he has seen his sack total drop for 3 straight years. Either the Bears weren't blitzing him often enough, or he just wasn't effective enough when called upon.



• The Bears no longer have big guys up front on the D-Line that are capable of tying up multiple blockers. Thus, Urlacher could potentially have more blockers to deal with this year than he did last year. He'll need to work on his ability to shed blocks and reverse the tendency he showed to try and run around blockers instead of stacking them up and stopping the play, as he played with too much finesse at times last year.



• The coaches have brought in a new defensive scheme that hasn't historically resulted in big numbers for the starting MLB, but rather tends to funnel all plays to the WLB. The MLB in the Cover-2 is often asked to drop into coverage, so that could potentially limit the number of tackles he's involved in.

Final Thoughts

Regardless of the problems he had in 2003, Urlacher still played well enough to make the Pro Bowl. Actually, if you look closely at his stats, while his tackle numbers were well off his record 2002 totals, they weren't very different from what he did in 2000 and 2001. The biggest problem in 2003 from a fantasy perspective is what happened to his big play numbers, as he only put up 2.5 sacks, 0 INTs, 0 FFs, and 0 FRs. For a guy who put up 14 sacks and 5 INTs over his first 2 seasons, those numbers were much lower than expected. In short, he was a good LB in 2003, but not the stud MLB everybody had come to know and love. While I don't think he'll quite live up to the expectations people had for him going into last season, he should at least return to being a top-10 fantasy LB in 2004, and he has even more value in dynasty leagues because of his youth.

Quotes from the IDP Spotlight Message Thread:

To view the entire thread, click here: LB Brian Urlacher, Chicago Bears

grady:
"The man is a beast, no doubt. He suffered last year in the defensive scheme that required him to be more disciplined. He has somewhat of a tendency to freelance which can be good, or it can be bad. My opinion is that this year it will benefit him greatly. Lovie Smith values speed and aggressiveness. If you look in the dictionary for those two words there is a picture of Urlacher next to it. I don't know that I need to say much more. He will return to fantasy form this year."

FFchamp:
"While I feel Urlacher will be much better than he was last year, I do not expect him to go back to being a top 2 or 3 LB. When Urlacher was a monster in the middle he had HUGE DT's directing traffic for him. This year he will get the big bodies back but they will be young and inexperienced. People tend to say that Lovie will let him freelance more and while that may be true, the middle is never the beneficiary in this cover 2 formation. It has always been the WLB and I expect that to continue. I do expect that Urlacher's misc points improve over last year."

Portis 26:
"I know Urlacher will probably prove an exception to the rule, but in general MLBs in the Tampa Bay style-D (which Lovie Smith is adopting in Chicago) put up very ordinary numbers."

Biabreakable:
"I do think he is one of the more talented defensive players in the league right now. However I am not really seeing this defensive system or the complementary personnel in it causing Urlacher to return to the production he had with those mammoth DTs in front of him eating up blockers which was copied from the scheme the Ravens used in their super bowl year. He may still be better than he was last year in a attacking blitzing scheme and he might improve his sacks and interceptions in the defense. But I am not seeing Urlacher return to muster tackle #s like he had before in this scheme.

Urlacher will still probably be a top 10 Lber because he does have a lot of talent. But I do not see him as being so clearly better statistically than some other perhaps less gifted players in schemes that give them more tackle opportunities."

bhotz76:
"Last season was the direct result of a team with no presence on the D-Line which resulted in Urlacher having to shed blocks instead of making tackles. I could not believe that he wasn't involved in a single turnover last year. He was on NFLTA last week and he said that Lovie expects a minimum of three sacks and three interceptions from him because of the way he'll be lined up on the field. Urlacher said Lovie would like to get closer to five in each category. With Lovie's D he will no longer have to read and react. This means he will be attacking the ball, shooting gaps and presumably making plays."

Projections

IDP Scoring System
1 pt per Solo Tackle
0.5 pt per Assisted Tackle
3 pts per Sack
4 pts per Interception
1 pt per Pass Defensed
2 pts per Forced Fumble
2 pts per Fumble Recovery