da Bears.

I’m trying to get out of the house to do some shopping, but stuff keeps coming up.

The Chicago Bears fired Matt Eberflus this morning. Tribune. ESPN.

This was not entirely unexpected. The Bears have lost six straight games, and are 4-8 this season. The big reason for pulling the trigger seems to be yesterday’s Lions game. It wasn’t just that they lost to Detroit, it was that the Bears completely botched the end of the game.

Instead of calling his final timeout, Eberflus watched as rookie quarterback Caleb Williams threw a long pass out of the reach of Rome Odunze as time expired.

(I don’t know why ESPN keeps referring to this as “Sunday’s game”. It was Thursday, right? My internal clock isn’t that messed up, is it?)

I didn’t see the game (we were busy eating Thanksgiving dinner out with our people) but from what I hear and read, Eberflus completely botched things. For crying out loud, the game ended with an unused timeout by da Bears!

“Bears fire Matt Eberflus shortly after making him meet with media” from Awful Announcing. Yes, he had a press conference this morning, in which he said “I’m confident I’ll be working to San Francisco and coaching that game.”…and then they fired him about two hours later.

The likeliest explanation, however, is merely that this is an organization where dysfunction has often been the default setting, and much like Eberflus on Thursday, the Bears were caught flat-footed. So while Eberflus’ firing may have been justified, there’s also plenty of evidence to suggest that Chicago’s problems extend well beyond whoever’s not calling timeouts from its sideline.

Eberflus was 14-32 in “three years”.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 29th, 2024 at 1:11 pm and is filed under Firings, NFL, Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

One Response to “da Bears.”

  1. Pigpen51 says:
    November 30, 2024 at 1:06 pm

    You know that I am a Lions fan here, but I like to think that a miscue by a coach, even one as bad as the one made on Thursday, would never be enough to fire that coach.
    That it happened with a coach of a team who has not shown much leadership over his Chicago tenure surely was the reason for the firing, only that mistake on what turned out to be the last play just cemented his exit. No doubt the players as well as the management lost faith in him at that point, and his firing was inevitable.
    For my own Detroit Lions, it is a different case. They have a coaching staff that is second to none in the NFL. It is readily apparent just looking at the injuries they have suffered on defense, and yet the level of play has not suffered all that much. Granted it is a huge loss to see Aidan Hutchinson, Alex Ansalone, and now Malcom Rodriguez being hurt with significant injuries, yet the Lions have built their team around basically an ideal, with players on the sidelines ready to step in and continue that idea of a defense that at times bends, but doesn’t break.
    As a kid I liked the Lions, but followed the Dolphins of Miami, just because of the quality of players they had, from Larry Czonka, to Bob Griese to Mercury Morris and Paul Warfield. I don’t know if it is possible to field a team like that today, with the specialty guys that they use in the modern game. But at least now the players are getting paid enough that they no longer have to get a part time job during the off season.