Keep in mind that Matt Nagy is a head coach for the first time in the NFL. In these situations, it’s easy for a man to feel somewhat uncomfortable in his surroundings. He’s out on his own for the first time. The responsibility is on him alone. If the Chicago Bears don’t win from here on out, that’s his fault. In these situations, it’s perfectly natural for a coach to surround himself with familiar faces. People he knows and trusts.
When Dave Wannstedt was hired in 1993, he brought Ron Turner in to run the offense and Bob Slowik to run the defense. Turner had worked with him at USC in the mid-1980s. Slowik was a defensive assistant under him the year before in Dallas. There was instant familiarity. Dick Jauron took over for Wannstedt in 1999. One of his first hires was Greg Blache as defensive coordinator, whom he’d worked with for six years in Green Bay.
One man who went against the norm was Lovie Smith. His biggest hires in 2004 were Terry Shea and Ron Rivera. Neither had ever worked with him in the past. A year later Smith did it again, replacing Shea with Ron Turner. People can debate which style is better, but the results speak for themselves. Wannstedt and Jauron combined for two playoff appearances in a decade. Smith made two appearances and went to a Super Bowl using his method.
Which style would Nagy use?
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Matt Nagy went out of his comfort zone on advice from Andy Reid
It turns out he’d go the Lovie route. Nagy knew his job wasn’t to make himself comfortable. It was to make the Bears as successful as possible. That meant hiring coaches that were good at their jobs, not familiar with him. His first order of business was convincing Vic Fangio to return as defensive coordinator.
Nagy had never worked with him before, but he knew the man’s reputation, respected it and was perfectly happy keeping things as they were. It took some convincing but Nagy eventually sold the veteran coordinator on returning. That done, the next order of business was finding his offensive coordinator. It was here the Bears head coach threw one of the biggest curveballs of the NFL offseason.
His choice ended up being Mark Helfrich. Not only had the former Oregon head coach never served on an NFL team before, he’d actually been out of football for all of 2017, serving as a TV analyst. The selling point was Helfrich’s reputation for offensive innovation, along with something else according to Peter King from NBC Sports.
“A longtime friend on the Chiefs’ staff last year strongly advised Nagy to reach out to Helfrich, who badly wanted to get back into coaching. When Nagy first called Helfrich during the Chiefs’ season to check in, he didn’t have much time—Helfrich and wife were on a short vacation in central Oregon, and cell service was spotty. Nagy, Andy Reid’s offensive coordinator in Kansas City, wanted an imaginative alter-ego to team with on offense if he got a shot at a head-coaching job.”
Nagy made it clear he wanted something different with Helfrich
He’d done great things in Kansas City with the Chiefs offense but at the end of the day, it didn’t win them a Super Bowl. So how could he work to improve upon it? After seeing his friend and former colleague Doug Pederson have so much such with a run-pass option-heavy attack in Philadelphia en route to a title, it got him to thinking about ways he too could embrace that growing trend.
Helfrich, along with Chip Kelly at Oregon, were some of the original innovators of that style. They helped it go mainstream in college. It wasn’t just that though. Nagy was also acting on a piece of advice he got from his mentor, Andy Reid.
“Andy always told us, ‘Hire people better than you are,’” Nagy said. “That appealed to me. I asked Mark after about 15 minutes of talk, you know, hey, if I get a job, do you think you’d have any interest at all? And after maybe 30 seconds of thinking about it, he said, ‘It’s crazy you called. There is interest.’ So once I heard that, now we can really start talking. So we did.”
Helfrich has had a reputation for being an offensive innovator for a long time. Several other coaches including Kelly and former mentor Dirk Koetter have said so. Though his exploits were at the college level, one could say he had more sustained offensive success at a high level than Nagy did in Kansas City. So in that context, it made sense the Bears head coach followed the advice and recommendations.
It also explains why Reid has been so good at cultivating future head coaches. He too doesn’t search for friends. He searches for the best possible coaches he can find. It’s nice to see Nagy embracing the same philosophy.
