Matt Nagy achieved a bit of history in 2018, becoming the fifth Chicago Bears head coach to win the NFL Coach of the Year award. He was the first to do so in his first season and claimed the seventh honor overall for the franchise. Not bad for a debut. This is a big reason why expectations are so high for 2019. Nagy has this team believing they can go all the way. The talent is there and his leadership is impossible to question.
Yet there is one lingering concern. History shows that Bears head coaches who win that award tend to not always deliver the next year. It’s not due to one coach being inferior to another either. All the great ones in Bears history suffered this problem. One of the hardest things to do in sports is having success one year and then trying to top it the next. Here is what happened each time a Bears head coach won the award and the results of the following season.
- George Halas (1963) – Bears go 5-9 in 1964
- George Halas (1965) – Bears go 5-7-2 in 1966
- Mike Ditka (1985) – Bears go 14-2 and lose playoff opener in 1986
- Mike Ditka (1988) – Bears go 6-10 in 1989
- Dick Jauron (2001) – Bears go 4-12 in 2002
- Lovie Smith (2005) – Bears go 13-3 and lose Super Bowl in 2006
Of those seven instances, the only one where the coach actually improved on what he did the previous year was Smith in 2006. He went from 11-5 to 13-3 and reached the Super Bowl. The other six occasions ended in different levels of disappointment. Even “Papa Bear” Halas himself fell victim to it not once but twice.
Matt Nagy faces the biggest challenge a head coach can have
One of the hardest things to do as a head coach in sports is getting a team to play better when they already did really good the year before. Jimmy Johnson said after the Dallas Cowboys cruised to their first Super Bowl in 1992 that he had to be even harder on them than he was the previous year. The reason is that the greatest enemy of a good football team is complacency.
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It’s okay if there’s a lot of hype around a team. The biggest problem is if the players start to believe it. They start to think they’re good enough and tend to stop doing the little things necessary to win. Before they know it, they’ve lost their edge and the losses start to pile up. It happened to the Bears several times over the years. Nagy is about to embark on his attempt to show that he can be different.
