Bear Digest

Ryan Poles Sees Matt Eberflus' People Skills Uniting Bears

After a difficult two seasons, Bears GM Ryan Poles is seeing even more evidence of coach Matt Eberflus' abilty to guide a team through tough times and then unite them.

Gene Chamberlain

Matt Eberflus coaches at Soldier Field against the Bengals. GM Ryan Poles is impressed with his ability to unite the Bears.
Matt Eberflus coaches at Soldier Field against the Bengals. GM Ryan Poles is impressed with his ability to unite the Bears. / Daniel Bartel-USA TODAY Sports
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If anything has come out of the Bears being on Hard Knocks beyond their ability to censor and a ferret legend named Crash, it's exactly why Bears GM Ryan Poles wanted Matt Eberflus back as his coach.

The back room revelations of the HBO series have only strengthened the understanding of how players hold Eberflus with high regard and what his skills dealing with the team really are. Those who talked about Eberflus as a coach destined for the hot seat and then for unemployment after this year look entirely wrong at this point.

Much can change with a poor season, but everything revealed by training camp and preseason indicate an improved team. Poles this week indicated only respect for where Eberflus has situated the team.


"I think his resilience, for where our roster was and for how far we knew it had to go to set a standard and hold everybody to that is extremely difficult,” Poles said. “To keep a team together through adversity is extremely difficult, but I think at the end of the day what's going to be awesome is like those things will be established and then when the winning comes, you have a stronger product because of it.”

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The 14-game losing streak left plenty of questions with the fan base.

“I really look at the resilience piece of it,” Poles said.

There was plenty of room for resilience when they were 3-14 and then 0-4 last year after blowing the three-touchdown lead against Denver.

“It's so hard with pressure to stay the course,” Poles said. “There's a lot of noise in terms of doing different things and changes and all that.

“To hold the line, it takes a special man to do that and he's done that. Then just the ability to adapt and adjust. You can see that on a daily basis. Always trying to get better, taking the feedback from players, what do we need to change, what do we need to adjust? What are you guys seeing? How are you feeling? Then making the tweaks, That (player-coach) relationship has been incredible.”

Eberflus talked last week about making changes within his system to be more aggressive. For example, the safety blitz or slot blitz.

“I’ll probably add a third thing,” Eberflus said. “It’s kind of coming to me, but just investing in relationships. He's had every single person on our team over at his house to spend time there to get to know them better.

“There's (team) activities and things that he did, but that was done intentionally that wasn't just to do it and check a box. It was to really invest in our players and build that trust because he needed that.”

It’s more of a modern coaching technique, definitely not the Mike Ditka approach of the 1980s. There are many ways to unit a team and this was Eberflus’ approach.

“I think our team has done a really good job of coming together,” Eberflus said. “That’s everybody on task in terms of, starting on April 15 until now, of bringing our team together.

“I trust the leadership of this team. I can feel the closeness and the bond that they are forming earlier than ever before. I can just feel that with these guys. That’s not just coaches, that’s players, leaders. That’s everybody–staff, front office, everybody. So it’s important that we are all on there. We have been very intentional about that, and very authentic in terms of our approach to that.”

It’s become more and more apparent it’s his approach and now they’ll find out to what degree he’s succeeded.

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.