Bear Digest

Ideal Point for Bears Coaching Shake-Up Looms Barring Improvement

Analysis: The ideal change at the moment for the Bears is swapping out play-callers but the ideal point for a head coaching change is fast approaching.

Gene Chamberlain

It's probably too soon for a Matt Eberflus firing but the play calling issues require drastic action of some kind.
It's probably too soon for a Matt Eberflus firing but the play calling issues require drastic action of some kind. / Mike Dinovo-Imagn Images
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Honestly, no one should expect to hear Matt Eberflus has been fired on Monday morning.

Not many teams fire head coaches after a 4-5 start. It's like something Jerry Jones might have done at one time, but he had a worse record than the Bears at 3-5 and hadn't fired Mike McCarthy.

And as everyone should know by now, the Bears have never fired a coach during a season.

Besides, there is a perfect dropping-off point ahead if nothing improves and it actually is during the regular season.

First, it isn't fair to Eberflus and staff to be let go before they've even played a divisional game. Perhaps if they owned a 2-7 record in his third season, it could be justified.

The Bears have actually come back from 3-5 records to make the playoffs twice so the powers that be at Halas Hall would find it difficult to justify letting Eberflus go now before he's been given the chance to prove they can actually climb back into it by beating NFC North competition.

Of course they're not going to measure up against these teams. They haven't beaten Green Bay since 2018. The Lions look like the NFC reps for the Super Bowl at this point. And the Minnesota Vikings have two losses. They don't lose to drastically inferior teams on their home field.

The Bears did and they'll be playing the Packers, Vikings and Lions in succession in the next 18 days.

Then comes the perfect dropping-off point.

Three more losses in a row would make it a six-game losing streak and one full round of NFC North competition would be in the books. Six straight losses and at 4-8 the rest of the year becomes merely an attempt to avoid serious injuries anyway.

And they would have a mini-bye week coming. They wouldn't play again until a Dec. 8 beating they can be expected to absorb at San Francisco on a Sunday night game, although at this point you'd have to think the folks at NBC would be doing anything possible to flex out of that game.

A 50-10 game gets televisions turned to other channels in a hurry. Check that, 50-9 because the Bears don't score touchdowns and you usually would need a TD and PAT to get to 10.

It's been two full games without a touchdown. They scored 95 points over three weeks and followed it up by crashing with 27 points for the last three games.

It really takes some doing to go 1-for-14 on third downs, get your quarterback sacked on 23% of pass attempts and to average 3.7 yards a play.

The Bears frequently complain about how their penalties are setting them back too much. They committed fewer penalties than the Patriots. Of course any penalties are going to be a setback when your offense is as anemic as theirs.

You'd think Terry Shea was back calling these plays, or John Shoop, or Dowell Loggains or insert your Bears failed offensive coordinator of the last 30 years here.

Players won't come out directly and say the coaching staff has lost the team.

"Yes, I'm confident in my head coach," Williams said. "They brought me here for a reason. They brought all of us here for a reason. As players, when we're in the locker room, we know how good we are. We know how good we can be. Right now, we're not executing, we're not hitting on cylinders, and we have all the confidence in each other, to be honest with you."

No one said anything about the offensive coordinator, though. Play callers can be swapped out.

The Bears did it under Matt Nagy. They don't even have to fire Shane Waldron to do it. He can simply be coordinator of the offense during the week of preparation, much like defensive coordinator Eric Washington is. Then, on game days, he lets someone else call the plays. Presumably it would be Thomas Brown, the passing game coordinator who was Panthers offensive coordinator.

Williams referred back to their previous stretch of three straight wins and said it's possible to restart the offense.

"Right now, we have an event—and it's kind of what I go by in my life," he said. "We have an event, and the most important thing, because you can't always control the event, the most important thing is for us to respond.

"Our response equals the outcome, whether it's good or bad or indifferent."

It's time for Matt Eberflus to respond with a play caller change. It might be the only hope he has of restoring the punch in the attack like they had over three game earlier this season.

If they don't get this accomplished, that Thanksgiving Day game with Detroit and the ideal jumping-off point for a head coach loom bigger every day on the horizon.

Twitter: BearsOnSI

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Gene Chamberlain
GENE CHAMBERLAIN

BearDigest.com publisher Gene Chamberlain has covered the Chicago Bears full time as a beat writer since 1994 and prior to this on a part-time basis for 10 years. He covered the Bears as a beat writer for Suburban Chicago Newspapers, the Daily Southtown, Copley News Service and has been a contributor for the Daily Herald, the Associated Press, Bear Report, CBS Sports.com and The Sporting News. He also has worked a prep sports writer for Tribune Newspapers and Sun-Times newspapers.