Jaylon Johnson Describes Locker Room Confrontation With Matt Eberflus After Bears' Loss

Johnson was among several Bears players who had lost faith in their head coach.

Jaylon Johnson expressed his frustration with former head coach Matt Eberflus amid another disappointing loss on Thanksgiving Day. / Troy Taormina-Imagn Images

The Chicago Bears fired head coach Matt Eberflus last week following the franchise's Thanksgiving Day clock management debacle that cost the the team a chance to tie the game against the Detroit Lions in the waning seconds of regulation.

The Bears ran a disaster of a two-minute drill, and allowed time to tick off the clock needlessly after quarterback Caleb Williams was sacked with just under 40 seconds to go, which knocked the Bears out of field goal range. Chicago had one timeout remaining, and Eberflus let time elapse as his players struggled to get organized to run the next play. Ultimately, Williams took the next snap with just six seconds to go, and his deep pass fell incomplete as time expired.

Eberflus was dismissed the next day, but the writing had been on the wall for a while. The Bears were flailing in the stacked NFC North, and the players had lost faith in their head coach. After the Thanksgiving Day loss, star cornerback Jaylon Johnson interrupted Eberflus's postgame speech and confronted his head coach.

Johnson described the incident on the radio this week in Chicago.

"There was frustration," Johnson told WSCR radio in Chicago on Monday. "There was words from myself that I expressed just from my frustration from losing. Part of what I said after the game was I've been losing for five years. I feel like a high-level player like myself, after a certain point, losing games how we've been losing games, somebody has to express something. It was a spur of the moment thing, and it went the way it went.

The Bears named Thomas Brown the interim head coach, less than a month after he was named the play caller in the wake of Shane Waldron's firing.

Brown will look to lead the Bears to some wins down the stretch of the season to stake his claim for the head coaching job next season and beyond.

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