The previous Bears president, Ted Phillips, didn’t want the public to know how involved he was in helping to choose the franchise’s head coaches. His background as a bean counter didn’t exactly give him street cred when it came to football decisions. Neither did some of the coaches hired during his tenure, including Marc Trestman, Matt Nagy and Matt Eberflus. With that track record, you can understand his stab at stealth.
The current Bears president, Kevin Warren, would like everyone to know that he’s in charge of everything, even if that’s not exactly true. Getting him to acknowledge at a recent press conference that general manager Ryan Poles — sitting at his side — would have the final say on the next head coach was like getting Warren to donate a limb to science. You’d call it awkward if it were any other place than Halas Hall, where awkward has had a corner office since the McCaskey family took over ownership of the franchise.
Anyone who thought things would go smoothly after the Bears fired Eberflus last week would have had to be a high-functioning tree stump. It’s been a mess almost from the minute he was allowed to have a press conference Friday, only to be fired hours later. Warren later said he regretted that Eberflus had met with reporters via Zoom that morning, but said the Bears hadn’t decided to fire him yet.
Hadn’t decided to fire him? Seriously? On Thursday, the coach had failed to use a timeout that could have helped get his team in field-goal range to tie it at 23 with seconds left against the Lions. It was such an egregious mistake that Poles should have canned him on the way to the locker room. Eberflus’ later and continued insistence that his late-game plan was sound should have cost him his 401(k).
It was the Bears’ sixth straight loss, and Eberflus was directly responsible for at least two of them. Thus, nothing is more incriminating than Warren’s declaration that he and the rest of the brain trust hadn’t yet decided to fire him Friday morning.
These are the people in charge of choosing a head coach.
Warren talked at length about the attributes the Bears are looking for in their next victim. Not surprisingly, it’s everything that Eberflus wasn’t. Decisive. Creative. Demanding. That’s how the NFL works. Teams hire the opposite of what they had before. Lots of criteria would seem to go into such an important decision, but boiled down, contrast is often the biggest factor: He’s not like the last guy, What’s His Name.
A recent CBS report, quoting sources, said that the Bears are looking for a “leader of men.’’ Imagine that. Forty-one years of McCaskey ownership brought the team to this realization. I’m tempted to say it’s about time, but these people move as quickly as the family DeSoto.
I’m sure the McCaskeys looked at Lions coach Dan Campbell, his daring decisions and his road roller of a chin, and thought: “This must be what people refer to as a leader of men!’’ I’m not sure they’d recognize a leader of men if one passed by with 100 guys in tow.
Too bad they didn’t think of this last January, when they had a chance at getting maximum leader of men Jim Harbaugh. Many years ago, they had a leader of men in Mike Ditka but mistook him for a jackhammer. Too loud. A walking, talking violator of local noise ordinances. That might have been Harbaugh’s problem, too. That and the winning.
One of the things Eberflus was most concerned about the past season and a half was his players staying together, i.e. not revolting. Now we know why. In the days since he was fired, players — some named, some not — talked about their frustration with Eberflus’ decision making. Nobody had the guts to talk about it when he was still in charge, but money makes cowards of a lot of people.
At some juncture in Eberflus' coaching career, someone must have told him that the way to get fired is to lose your players. So he preached togetherness, even as the congregation wanted him defrocked. He wanted to talk about why his decision to hold onto a timeout against the Lions was a good one, even as his players were thinking it was a horrendous one. It was all about appearances.
A leader of men isn’t worried about keeping his job. His primary concern isn’t how it will look if his players are unhappy. His only purpose in life is winning.
There’s been some talk about the importance of allowing Caleb Williams to have a say in the hiring of the Bears’ next coach. I’m not a fan of players, especially rookie quarterbacks, having input into who’ll be their next boss.
But if the choice is between Williams, an athlete, and Warren, a lawyer, for having a vote, let’s go with the one tasked with throwing a football, not the one tasked with building a new stadium for the McCaskeys.
