SO, WHO IS THE NEXT COACH OF THE CHICAGO BEARS? BEN JOHNSON? TIM WALZ?
Matt Eberflus has no presence and had no defense as his players slumbered in Arizona, where Caleb Williams looked lost on the wrong team and leaders didn’t show up after last week’s Hail Mary disaster
The goodbye door should be cracked for Matt Eberflus, a man of many facial and hair styles with no NFL leadership abilities. He failed to revive the Chicago Bears from their Hail Mary disarray, and worse, he uses a defense that can’t avoid ghastly penalties or stop Emari Demercado, a running back whose history escapes me. If hail doesn’t come from a prayer, it came Sunday with ice from the sky inside an open Arizona dome.
When does hail become hell?
Eberflus might want to look in the mirror and ignore his coiffure.
He won’t make the postseason for the third straight year after a 29-9 loss to the Cardinals. His record is 14-28. He can’t win on the road. How precious were Ryan Poles and George McCaskey for hiring him from Indianapolis? With Kevin Warren stepping in from stadium perusal hogwash, how fascinating to retain Eberflus last offseason when they could have sought another head coach? Let him move to his old coordinator’s role somewhere else.
Who’s available? Tim Walz took a shot at the Bears last week and might be looking for career guidance Tuesday night. Otherwise, why would Ben Johnson come from the NFC centerpiece in Detroit, where he’s leading Jared Goff to a possible MVP award and might have a mega-offer from Dallas that will elude the McCaskeys? Before the Bears dropped to 4-4 with an empty resume and push toward an 8-9 season — if not uglier — we noticed Kliff Kingsbury smiling as the offensive coordinator behind swirling Jayden Daniels and the 7-2 Washington Commanders. Why would he come to Halas Hall?
Didn’t Poles and Eberflus tell him no before hiring Shane Waldron, who has whiffed as he tries to integrate Caleb Williams into the real world? Keep thinking. The Bears need another coach in an 11-year period after they hired and fired Marc Trestman, John Fox and Matt Nagy while Eberflus makes his way to the burial ground. Who is this poor sap? They are in a division with brilliant offensive coaches and can’t afford a defensive mind in charge of the operation.
Consider this your lesson until early January, as the Bears remain among the NFL’s bigger losers and will miss the playoffs — where they haven’t won since 2011 — for the 12th time in 14 years. JD Vance? JB Pritzker?
The idea, I assume, is to pull whatever has plagued the Bears through time from the quarterback ecosystem. Williams has been Bear-ed. It’s official, as he keeps speaking to himself and reveals disturbed shrugs. He misses passes. Receivers drop passes. He is the one who enlightened America two years ago at USC. The Bears haven’t turned us on since 1985. For some strange reason, Williams remained in the game until the end. He limped away with a leg injury, forcing CBS analyst Charles Davis to lay into Eberflus.
“I’m sorry, this just does not make sense to me,” Davis said. “This is your rookie quarterback. This is the face of your franchise. I don’t think he should have been out there. I hope he’s OK.”
Flus? “Getting work," he said. “Getting work and getting timing, getting timing in the two-minute operation. That's what we're doing.”
“OK,” Williams said of his ankle. “Not my decision.”
Make sure Williams is healthy and fix him with new coaches. He was sacked six times and completed only 22 of 41 passes for 217 yards. What happened to his cool relationships with DJ Moore, Rome Odunze, Keenan Allen and Cole Kmet? Williams is not going anywhere, even if he’d love a one-way ticket. He watched Tyrique Stevenson banter with fans and blow the Hail Mary, then saw the defense allow 213 rushing yards — 6.3 per carry — while Kyler Murray enjoyed life with the 5-4 winners. The Bears were wrecked by Stevenson’s mental stumble, forcing him to wear earphones early in the game, and will trash it summarily with Waldron’s fumbled handoff to 300-pound Doug Kramer Jr. They have little chance against the Lions, Green Bay and Minnesota in six games. Of Stevenson, Eberflus said, “He put his best foot forward. His teammates and his coaches and all of us in that circle got his back.”
Why? He ruined the season.
Don’t blame Williams yet. He has been around only eight games. We don’t recognize him, and as I suspected, whatever ails this franchise traditionally in Lake Forest has buried the No. 1 overall draft pick. My gosh, 101-year-old Virginia McCaskey was sent home after a brief semifinal stay in Pro Football Hall of Fame voting.
Let her make the next coaching decision. Might as well.
At halftime, trailing 21-9, Eberflus was roasted by fans on social media. “I told them that ‘Hey, this is what the score is and we have each other,’ ’’ he said on TV. “And that’s what we’re gonna do — we’re gonna execute on offense, defense and kicking and we’re gonna go out here and compete in the second half.” That’s all he had.
Eberflus let his players — brought in by Poles — disrupt the week with constant chatter about the Washington farce. Moore, Jaylon Johnson, Kevin Byard and Kmet spoke so nakedly and negatively in public that we asked if they were crying for help. Find them new coaches. Eberflus told them to be quiet when they should have known already. “You need to voice that one on one to everybody,” he said. “That’s important that you do that to the person that you need to do it to. It could be the person that’s next to you — the guard or the tackle — or your teammate or the coach, your position coach or the coordinator or myself. We have that policy that, hey, it’s open communication. And if it’s done in the right way with respect and if it’s done in the right way in the theme of winning, winning habits, then we’re all in for that.”
Said Moore, who talks too much as someone who received a $110 million extension: “It’s just got to stay in house next time. I mean, I’m not going to say sorry for what I said. But at the same time, it should have just stayed in house. But I said what I said.”
The result faded on the field, where the Bears saw more hail — the roof at State Farm Stadium closed slowly — and couldn’t deliver for Eberflus. When he kept his job, Poles relayed what he sees when they play golf. “Every time we go out, it stands out to me either on one side of the nine or the 18, he's struggling,” the general manager said. “But he never gets flustered, and he always has a really good other side. So it's just his mental toughness. And then he's super, super competitive.”
What sounded good in the summer isn’t working in November. By now, the Bears should be playoff contenders with Williams. Again, they look like the same reason to do something else on Sunday afternoons. Accountability? Try showing up for a game.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.