For a team that supposedly, "gets off the bus running the football," according to coach Lovie Smith, the Bears seem to be stumbling quite a bit.

The Bears managed 83 rushing yards on 23 attempts in Sunday night's 21-14 loss to the Falcons, only because quarterback Jay Cutler had a 30-yard scramble that gave him 34 yards for the game and made him the Bears' and, for that matter, the game's leading rusher.

Matt Forte, the presumptive featured runner, had 23 yards on 15 carries for a 1.5-yard average with a long gain of 5 yards. And that wasn't the worst of it. Forte fumbled on back-to-back carries from the Falcons' 1-yard line, losing the second one and contributing to one of the Bears' three red-zone trips that produced no points.

"You can't turn the ball over, and I turned it over," Forte said. "It was the goal line. They know you're going to run, and it's my job to hold on to the ball, and I didn't do that."

One of Cutler's two interceptions killed another red-zone opportunity, when he was picked by Thomas DeCoud at the Falcons' 9 in the first quarter.

Cutler has often been spectacular, with 10 touchdown passes, but he's also been picked off seven times.

And the Bears also committed an uncharacteristic nine penalties.

Three penalties on the final drive, the last of the red-zone failures, killed a drive that reached just inside the Atlanta 5. But on fourth-and-1, 13-year veteran left tackle Orlando Pace was flagged for a false start before Cutler's last pass fell incomplete with 29 seconds left.

"Very disappointing," Smith said. "[Despite] all the [negative] things, we still put ourselves in a position at the end to tie the game and have a chance to win the game. But we kind of self-destructed there a little bit."

At 3-2, the Bears are already 2 1/2 games behind the NFC North-leading Vikings, and they're on the road again next week against a Bengals team that is far from a pushover, especially for a team that squanders scoring opportunities and beats itself.

"We had a lot of opportunities to win the football game," Smith said. "You can't make those type of mistakes on the road against a good football team. When you have the ball in the red zone you need to be able to get some points, and those turnovers offensively really hurt us a lot. You've got to be able to put points on the board in those situations."