Fans are left in the dark about how the upcoming Chicago Bears head coaching search will go. The only certainty at this point is team president Kevin Warren will be a central figure in it. He said GM Ryan Poles would be leading the charge, but some still believe he will get fired after the season ends. That is a discussion in and of itself. However, one lingering fear among fans hasn’t gone away. It is that the organization may once again make use of a consultant or search firm to help with the process.
Team chairman George McCaskey has tried this method twice now. It is how the Bears ended up with John Fox in 2015 and Matt Eberflus in 2022. There is no evidence to suggest it works, yet this ownership seems ignorant enough to try again. Thankfully, Brad Biggs of the Chicago Tribune eased those fears.
It wouldn’t do Poles any good to wonder what went wrong before he arrived. If you’re talking about Chairman George McCaskey, I imagine he has spent time doing some of the same. He’s a hands-off owner, so it’s not like he’s inserting himself into football decisions. Hopefully the Bears have a better result in the coaching search this time. Unless we hear something different, it sounds like they won’t be using a consultant, and I never thought that was a great idea when Ernie Accorsi and then Bill Polian were hired.
Yes, Bill Polian and Ernie Accorsi were once excellent general managers. However, their commitment to the game had slackened by the time they were asked to help the Bears. Accorsi was 72 at the time and hadn’t been active in the NFL for 11 years. Polian was 79 and had retired 12 years before. Neither had the energy or the connections to make an accurate assessment of who the actual best candidates were. That is why Accorsi pushed the Chicago Bears towards Fox, who’d worked with the former GM in New York. It is also why Polian landed on Eberflus, who worked for Indianapolis, the last team he was GM for. It’s not a coincidence that Matt Nagy, the most successful coach of the past decade in Chicago, was chosen only by Bears representatives. This must be an in-house decision.
