WHAT IF THE BEARS, WITH NO VRABEL AND NO JOHNSON, BUY INTO THOMAS BROWN?
One by one, many top candidates will sign elsewhere, leaving us to wonder why general manager Ryan Poles — who should be without a job himself — was waxing so poetically about the interim head coach
Searching for a tavern, aching for a place to kick more ass and thrilled to haul his 260-pound torso — again, he’s a young Ditka — Mike Vrabel will show up for an interview in Lake Forest. Never mind his very quick appearance this week. He’ll rent a morning car, have lunch with George McCaskey and congratulate his mother for her 102nd birthday.
Then comes a one-way flight to Boston. Sorry, he isn’t coming to the Bears after his former bosses fired Jerod Mayo. He’s a smart man, Vrabel, knowing he’s beloved in New England and will work for a Patriots franchise that won six Super Bowls. Why bother as another shrug-a-bee candidate in Chicago?
Ben Johnson, too, eventually will appear for a lower-key discussion as he whispers to quarterbacks. He’ll sound like the next Kevin O’Connell or even Bill Walsh. He isn’t coming to the Bears, either — in my view — as Jacksonville offers freedom and no major-market pressure while other teams have more to provide. They’d have been the top candidates to become Halas Hall’s sixth (or seventh) head coach in 13 years, along with Kliff Kingsbury, who likely isn’t coming himself.
Heaven only can help us, then, if Kevin Warren and Ryan Poles are standing on a table and making too much of a Week 17 oxygen break. Are they now believing a 24-22 victory over the Packers should mean something more for Thomas Brown? That he deserves not only his own interview but should have the “interim” tag removed from his coaching gig? Can I remind these hellions that the result only matters for enemy coach Matt LaFleur, who foolishly exposed Jordan Love and Christian Watson to injuries and might have sabotaged Green Bay’s playoff chances? OK, it also helped people with Illinois plates who parked in lots near Lambeau Field, especially after Jaylon Johnson suffered an injury and flipped off Packers fans.
A mortifying season ended on a last-second pregnant pause, a means-nothing eyeroller in the weakest city in sports. At least Caleb Williams managed success, finally refusing to fail as another clock ticked away. With 15 seconds remaining on his own 49-yard line, he somehow found DJ Moore for an 18-yard gain, which came a play after Moore crushed the offense with an illegal shift. The ball was spiked with three seconds left, about when Matt Eberflus lost his job by blowing a timeout call and about when Tyrique Stevenson taunted fans at the beginning of his Hail Scary. How would the Bears botch this one?
They didn’t, with Cairo Santos drifting a 51-yard field goal through the uprights.
And so the hell what?
The final record is 5-12, which allows talk-radio goobers to roar about the future when the immediate thought must be the next coach. If it isn’t Vrabel and isn’t Johnson, will the Bears do something imminently McCaskey-ian and focus on Brown? He did a nice job, yes, in ending an 11-game losing streak to the Packers. He could be considered as an offensive coordinator for the next regime.
But head coach? Poles, the general manager who shouldn’t be employed himself, was waxing poetically about Brown.
“I’ve been so impressed with Thomas and his leadership,” Poles said Sunday on ESPN 1000. “I know the results haven't come. That was a very difficult situation he's been put in. I grew up in this business where you earn more, and that's exactly how we got here with Thomas. I feel like he's done a really good job. … He will get an interview, and I'm excited to hear his thoughts. Because he’s been here. He’s been here, he's seen and reflected just like we have on the past and how we got to this and why were the results, the results. So I'm excited to hear from his side on how we got here and how he would fix it.”
By now, Warren and Poles should be too advanced in their search to dwell on Brown, who replaced Eberflus back on Nov. 29. This is their plan for the future? “You could see the leadership traits, and then he got moved to the offense coordinator position and did well. We saw improvements on offense and then at the head coaching level, and he got the opportunity to do that and lead the entire team,” Poles said. “Just sitting in team meetings, meeting with him after games — he's a truth teller. He's someone that does challenge our players to get better, creates accountability. So there's a lot of really positive traits that Thomas has, and I've been proud of how he's stepped up and led this team down the stretch here. And again, it's not the results that we wanted in terms of wins and losses, but the traits of a leader. He absolutely has those.”
Maybe Poles is preparing Brown for another job elsewhere. Maybe not.
“You think about the first game, how the first game ended at our place against Green Bay,” said Brown, referring to a field-goal block that concluded a Nov. 17 loss. “No better feeling than Cairo having a chance to come on the field, great job on our field-goal team to protect. It was perfect execution, drilled it. Game over.”
Williams is on record as having faith in Brown, who said of Caleb: “He’s got a killer instinct … gonna be a franchise quarterback.” He managed to avoid David Carr’s all-time NFL sack record, but he also was told to throw with minimal yardage, to the point his first-half average was -0.7 yards — he’d have gained more by not throwing a pass. I’m not sure how he won. Are the Bears so scared of venturing beyond franchise boundaries to start over with another coach? That’s the sign of a born loser. Imagine what McCaskey thinks as Matt Nagy interviews for the head coaching job with the New Orleans Saints.
“To be able to have that moment was great,” Williams said of WINNING a game. “Being able to have the first win of 2025, being able to have the first win since 2015 in Lambeau, to be able to have the first win against Green Bay in (12) games. It’s the first of a lot, and really excited about this offseason.”
Excited about … tell us. “I know there’s been times throughout this season where we’ve marched down the field in two minutes over and over again … and those situations didn’t go our way, whether it was the Hail Mary or a bunch of other things, and so being able to do it this way, being able to end the season off the right way,” Williams said. “Being able to have the first win of 2025 versus Green Bay on a two-minute drive, I couldn’t ask for a better way.”
Stuck in third place in the monstrous NFC North, the Packers should have Love for the postseason after he lost feeling in his throwing hand. Still, he said: “I landed on it, on the ground, I think, and just lost pretty much all feeling in my hand. It pretty much just went numb.” Watson injured his right knee. Good luck in the playoffs against the Lions, Vikings and Eagles.
“I’m not too confident about that right now.” LaFleur said of Watson.
“It’s really tough, especially with Christian trying to bounce back from what he’s been dealing with and to be able to go out there and have that happen,” Love said. “It’s tough. I feel for Christian. But at the same time, it’s that same mindset we’ve talked about before. It’s next man up. So other guys are going to have to step up and play a huge role.”
In the big city to the south, weird fans will take bare strains of hope from one victory. The rest of Chicago is looking at Thomas Brown and wondering, once again, why the Bears even bother to play football.
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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.