Cole Kmet: Nervous energy, not panic, after Bears' shaky Family Fest

Ariana Pensy · Correspondent · 12 hours ago

CHICAGO - The Chicago Bears recently hosted their annual Family Fest at Soldier Field. However, if you went to Family Fest hoping to watch a functioning offense with little miscues and strong communication, you would have been greatly disappointed.

Chicago had several misalignments on the offensive line and one play where rookie running back Kyle Monangai ran the wrong way.

While this sounds concerning, especially given the offensive woes last season, tight end Cole Kmet chalked it up to nervous energy and not a systemic problem.

“I thought we had two good days prior to this and then I think today, kind of felt a little bit of nervous energy maybe a little bit. Just kind of felt that from maybe guys who are new or younger guys on the team and first time out in the stadium, fans around and I think that’s a good thing for us to go through and it did feel like a little bit of a preseason game atmosphere in a sense and I think those are good things to work through,” Kmet said. “I thought, obviously, the one offense, we really started off slow there in (our) first rack. But, I thought we picked it up along the way, had some hiccups here and there. But, definitely a lot more things that we need to clean up and be better with. But, I think all in all, I think today, some of it was maybe the nervous energy going around. Those are things that we got to work through and we got to get fixed quickly here with preseason games coming up and going into the season.”

Despite how the offense performed, Kmet thought Family Fest had a great feel to it.

With 23,000 fans in attendance, Family Fest gave the team the opportunity to experience a preseason game feeling before actually having their first preseason game on Sun. Aug. 10 (Noon / FOX) against the Miami Dolphins.

“The atmosphere was great. I thought the fans were great. You get the little breeze off the lake. Beautiful day today. So, it was kind of fun,” Kmet said. “We ended up staying at the hotel (the night before)t, which was a little different from how we’ve done Family Fest in the past and I thought that kind of just gave a good pregame feel to it all and pregame routine feel for everybody. So, I thought that was good for everybody to go through before we actually do it here in a week or so.”

Another note about Family Fest is that head coach Ben Johnson is not going to reveal too much about the offense in that setting. He likes to throw a lot of wrinkles and twists into the offense, but he doesn't want to disclose this until the regular season.

However, the players have noticed those wrinkles when Johnson is installing the plays.

“I think you can see it. You can see when he’s presenting and installing these plays and maybe not all of them we get a ton of reps up and you guys don’t maybe see all of them this time of year,” Kmet said. “But, you can see the design and the detail of them and what he wants to get done with each of these plays and really cool to see and I know everyone’s excited to go out there and execute these plays.”