Yannick Ngakoue Feeling at Home This Week

Yannick Ngakoue has quite a collection of teams to his credit in eight NFL seasons.

So when it's said he'll be facing his old team in practice this week, the obvious next question is which one?

It's the Indianapolis Colts who the Bears practice with Wednesday at Colts camp prior to Saturday's second preseason game pitting the two teams, and Ngakoue was practicing at this facility daily last year.

"A lot of good dudes that I played with on that team, built a lot of relationships over there," Ngakoue said after Monday's final Bears practice of the week at Halas Hall. "So I'm just excited to be able to go say 'hi' and practice with those guys and also just see how they're doing."

Ngakoue on Monday stepped up his participation in practices with his new team. He took part in team scrimmage extensively for the first time, although they weren't in pads.

Now the edge rusher practices for his sixth team in eight seasons against his last team. He made 9 1/2 sacks for the Colts last year.

"Yeah, he's been dong well," Bears coach Matt Eberflus said. "He's been picking up the scheme well, like we talked about when he first came. It's not a big stretch in terms of the scheme difference. He's been in it the last few stops that he had, so it's been pretty easy for him.

"And he's been practicing hard, working through individual, getting his feet down."

They expected it to be an easy adjustment for Ngakoue because the Colts last year played a four-man front and one-gap approach under Gus Bradley, who had been the defensive coordinator the previous year in Las Vegas when Ngakoue played there one season. And it was a very similar scheme to what the Bears use under Matt Eberflus.

In addition, Bears defensive line coach Travis Smith coached Ngakoue with the Raiders as an assitant D-line coach under defensive line coach Rod Marinelli.

"I feel like it's very smooth for me," Ngakoue said. "I'm blessed and thankful that I'm able to have coach Travis again. He's a great teacher, he allows you to just be yourself, and he's the same guy every day coming to work.

"So that's somebody that I love to play for and get coached by."

That last year working with Smith was the year Jon Gruden got fired and the Raiders picked it up from his dismissal to get into the playoffs. It's an experience Ngakoue counts as value at this point in his career.

"I just feel that adversity brings togetherness, do you know what I mean?" he said. "It just tests your character, and that was a special group, a group that was able to endure a lot of adversity and able to still get to the playoffs.

"I feel like going through those kind of distractions and seeing how far the team went that year was pretty special."

So far, Ngakoue likes what he sees from the Bears defensive front he is now a part of, after they picked up eight sacks in Saturday's preseason opener -- two more than they had for all three preseason games last year.

"It's just special, our group," Ngakoue said. "We just need to bring that momentum into the regular season, not trying to get past Indy or whatever.

"I just feel like that's great tape to watch, especially when we start the season and that adversity hits, just to see how we were rolling in the beginning of the season. We need to remember what kind of group we are and four equals one, four D-linemen getting to the quarterback."

Eberflus liked what he saw from the defensive line against the Titans Saturday, as well, but called it far from perfect.

"Yeah, I thought it was good, to a certain degree it was better in terms of the punch, playing on the other side of the line of scrimmage," he said. "I certainly felt that. But the precision and detail needs to be cleaned up. That was my main message to the whole team.

"So the first team offense, when they were in there, the precision and detail needs to improve," he said. "Same thing with the first-team defense."

In the afternoon meetings Monday Eberflus and coaches planned to hit those details hard with players on boths ideas of the ball.

"How the precision and detail of your position, and how we execute is so important to us getting favorable down-and-distances moving the chains down the field, getting in scoring position or stopping people from getting in scoring position," he said. "That's all evident on the tape. It's right there. And we just gotta learn from that."

Then they'll take what they talked about and apply it against the Colts, whether it's members, Ngakoue or members of the defense.

Their plan is to get the most out of the two practices and the game that they can because the final week of preseason next week usually is focused on players who might be cut.

"Just the skillset, I've been talking about that," Eberflus said. "That's really important because we want matchups.

"We'll talk to the Colts staff about, hey, what matchups we're gonna get. We're gonna have a meeting the night before with their staff, which will be cool to be able to sit down and talk about the practices, talk about the tempo of practice, talk about the matchups and making sure we're squared away so we're both getting what we want to see out of the practices. And so that's really it, the skillsets. You get to match people up."