Matt Eberflus getting fired was inevitable. Everybody with common sense saw it coming. You don’t have the worst losing streak in franchise history, fire six assistant coaches, including two offensive coordinators, and post the worst record ever in one-score games and get to keep your job. There were plenty of reasons why Eberflus was a failure. His inability to elevate the offense was an obvious one. Not taking accountability for his mistakes was another. Perhaps most frustrating was the horrible clock management and late-game decision-making. Fans and media alike knew it. Yet the craziest part? His own assistants discussed it behind his back. Chris Beatty admitted as much during his latest press conference.
The Bears’ wide receivers coach was promoted to offensive coordinator after Thomas Brown took over as interim head coach. He told Adam Hoge of CHGO and others that the two men talked about the game management problems even before Eberflus was fired.
“Brown kind of knew that was one of my things,” Beatty said, adding that the two had discussions about the Bears’ game management issues before Brown took over as the interim head coach. “When he became in charge it was easy for us to say, hey we need to clean these parts of our organization up and be able to be in a position to where we don’t have those same things happen to us.”
Chris Beatty proves how bad it was behind the scenes.
You know you probably aren’t a good head coach when even your own assistants are questioning your capability behind your back. Not that this should be a surprise. These men get paid to coach and analyze football at the highest level. If fans could see Eberflus was in way over his head, they saw it too. Chris Beatty isn’t naive. He’s been around the game for decades. No doubt he wished the Bears could’ve found a solution to the problem sooner, but it was obvious the head coach lacked the wherewithal to make it happen. It seems he and Brown knew there was a chance Eberflus might get fired. If and when that happened, they first needed to improve internal communication so such mistakes were far less frequent.
Yes, any of the better NFL teams would have run a play to get the 6 yards we needed, let the clock run down to 4 seconds, called a timeout and then kicked the field goal. The fact that the Bears couldn’t execute on that is the biggest indictment on Eberflus.
@David; Good on TB for taking responsibility. As I wrote, my beef is not over the TO, it’s why wasn’t the offense way better prepared for that end of game situation? I think it’s a very fair question, particularly if he is under consideration for HC.
@David: So looking forward to seeing more man coverage. I’m so tired of having a great CB like Jaylon having to tackle a WR who can see the soft spot in the zone and park there for another first down catch. I get that there has to be some variety, but why have great CBs if they are just going to guard an area of grass? Heck, all the O has to do is to have no one run routes into Jaylon’s zones, and they will neutralize one of the Bears better assets in pass defense. Instead, in man coverage,… Read more »
@David- Agree about Wash, let’s see what he’s got. My ptsd won’t let me give ya love about Nagy though. I get that it’s easier for TB and Beatty now that TB is HC but don’t you wonder why they didn’t fix things before? Especially when TB became coordinator.
@Tcloud Thomas Brown stated that he wasn’t excluded by taking responsibility for any of the losses this season. He actually stood up their like a man and admitted that. But it’s also been determined that Brown was in the booth while calling plays and he didn’t have the authority to tell Caleb to take the timeout through the helmet speaker etc. In Flus’s “Structure” Flus was responsible for calling the timeouts. Caleb said he didn’t want to “step on toes” as if they had that conversation earlier in the year perhaps. The non-Time Out was 100% on Flus.