One thing that has been apparent since Week 4 is the Chicago Bears have not utilized D'Andre Swift on the ground much in the second half of games.
We know why that was the case in Week 4, as Swift was benched because of what head coach Ben Johnson said was an "egregious" fumble.
But in Week 5 against the Green Bay Packers, Swift saw just one carry in the second half, and then he had just four in the final two quarters of the win over the Atlanta Falcons in Week 6.
Even in a crucial drive to close out the game on Sunday, it was Roschon Johnson, not Swift, handling the work.
When asked about this on Monday, Bears offensive coordinator Press Taylor said the reason is Chicago is trying to keep Swift fresh for the entire season.
"I think a little bit is I think there's a mindfulness to preserve him a little bit. It's a long season," Taylor explained, per ESPN's Courtney Cronin. "Just aware of D'Andre and how he's been throughout the course and how invaluable he is for us throughout the course of the season."
"And there's an opportunity... obviously Roschon unfortunately had a fumble in the fourth quarter there, but we felt like Roschon was really contributing pretty well for us in a number of aspects," Taylor added. "He showed up in the pass game quite a bit, had some good carries, some good runs. Obviously, we've got to eliminate the turnover itself, but Roschon was rolling pretty good there too, so we felt comfortable rolling with him in there as well. And Swifty was ready to go if we needed it. So no, there's nothing really too much beyond that."
Johnson, who is filling in for the injured Kyle Monangai, played a lot better on Sunday than he did the week before, but he had a costly fumble in the fourth quarter that gave the Falcons a chance to even the score. Thankfully, Chicago's defense made a stop.
But if that didn't happen, there would have been plenty of second-guessing about the Bears not deploying their better running back, and rightly so.
The importance of Kyle Monangai
As good as Johnson looked, the fumble notwithstanding, he is a clear downgrade from Monangai, who has been the Bears' best running back this season overall.
With the Bears taking this approach with Swift, it only further shows just how important Monangai is.
Not only are the Bears a better team with their duo of Swift and Monangai intact, but there is also zero drop-off when Swift is sitting for a large swath of a game.
Monangai continues to recover from his turf toe injury as we turn the page to Week 7.
He was a non-participant on the estimated practice report on Monday and he appears to be trending toward sitting again, which isn't much of a surprise because of the short week the Bears are operating on and his lack of progress at practice last week.
But the hope is Monangai will be ready to go by Week 8 after he wasn't placed on injured reserve, which means the Bears believe he won't miss more than the third game he's on track to miss this week.
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