A Coach for the Full Team

Bears coach Matt Eberflus will give up defensive play calling to concentrate on coaching the full team.

Matt Eberflus didn’t come to the Bears to coach the defense.

He’s coaching the entire team.

For that reason the new Bears coach says he will allow the defensive coordinator he hires to call defensive plays–this despite the fact his Colts defense excelled at preventing scoring and taking away the ball.

“I do believe that to be the head football coach and to be efficient at that, you are exactly the head football coach,” Eberflus said Monday at his first press conference. “So I can be involved in all aspects of the game, the defensive coordinator that we hire will call the defensive plays. I will not do that. “

The Bears have not announced a defensive coordinator hire yet, but NFL Network’s Tom Peliserro reported Colts defensive backs coach Alan Williams is being considered for the job.

"My next piece of advice for the players, for sure, is get your track shoes on because we're running."

The Bears will use a 4-3 defense with plenty of cover-2 and cover-3 zone, just as Lovie Smith’s teams did. It’s a scheme Eberflus has been working in since his college coaching days and was involved with at Dallas as linebackers coach before going to Indianapolis. His Colts cover-2 style teams had been 10th or better in four straight seasons at taking away the ball and at scoring defense.

"My next piece of advice for the players, for sure, is get your track shoes on because we're running," Eberflus said. 

Plenty of running was the way the Bears approached their first camp under Smith, too. They wound up with more hamstring injuries than they could handle.

"People always ask, 'hey, how do you get a football team to play hard, to play fast, to play physical, to do exactly what they're supposed to do? How do you do that?' " Eberflus said. "That's a question I always get asked, and it's a foundational piece. 

"What we want to do is build the foundation. In this first year we want to build this foundation of what we're going to look like, of what Chicago fans, alumni can be proud of."

Eberflus detailed his foundation, and it's his "HITS" principle, a motivational tool in which the H stands for: hustle, intensity, takeaways and smarts.

The takeaways get stressed in just as they did when Smith was coaching the Bears and they picked up incomplete passes at practice and tried returning them to get used to the drastic turnaround on plays.

“It's all about the ball,” Eberflus said. “It's all about the ball.

“That's the most important thing for winning and losing is taking the ball away and protecting the football.”

The “smart” aspect of the acronym is something the Bears would do well to learn quickly because their stupid play went a long way toward getting coach Matt Nagy fired. Dumb presnap penalties and penalties for taunting or unnecessary roughness were particularly painful for the 2021 Bears.

The Bears led the NFL in taunting penalties with four during a season when the league had stressed to teams that this would be an emphasis for officials.

“So smart is really being no stupid penalties, make sure we're squared away with the penalties, should be in the top five every year in (fewest) penalties,” Eberflus said.

Saying this and preventing them are two different things. The solution is teaching the Bears differently.

“I think it’s through education,” Eberflus said. “We're teachers. Coaches are really just teachers; that's all we are. We're just teaching football, so you educate. You educate through film, you educate through having officials out there, you educate how important it is to winning, what that penalty did to us in terms of a negative sense, and what playing clean football does for us for a winning sense. I think that's important.”

Also important considering Eberflus’ background on the defensive side of the ball is the offensive coordinator hire, former Packers passing game coordinator and quarterbacks coach Luke Getsy.

He'll be tasked with helping bring along quarterback Justin Fields.

“So during the course of your time in the NFL, 13, 14 years now in the league, you look at certain offenses,” Eberflus said. “You look at certain styles. You look at the tree of which certain people come from. Then you look and see how they operate.”

The family tree for the Packers offense is the popular Shanahan style, although the version the Packers used under Matt LaFleur the last two years had more run-pass option than some other versions. The Bears used RPO extensively under Nagy.

“I'm big into metrics and measuring how people operate in terms of their efficiency, and they have certainly been that where he's been,” Eberflus said. “Then you look at different things, you start calling around and asking about the man.

“That's where Luke is special. He's special that way. He's tough, innovative, smart, and works well with team. He's a big team guy. I'm excited about where he is. He's been on my radar for a while.”

Eberflus made quite an impression on his new GM, Ryan Poles. The two had the same agent, former Bear Trace Armstrong, and this didn't hurt, as Poles admitted.

"I was also looking for a brother to create an elite partnership with," Poles said. "When Matt walked in the door and interviewed, even without knowing, he just started checking off all the boxes. 

"He described a detailed plan that had depth. He talked about building relationships with players and setting a new standard, and most importantly, he wanted to do all of that with the Chicago Bears."

He wants to do it with all of them, not just the defense.

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