Matt Eberflus Made Bears History In The Bad Way

The last time I wrote about a tragic Chicago Bears ending, some fans shared that they’d evolved a new rooting interest: A loss that flattered rookie quarterback Caleb Williams but damned head coach Matt Eberflus was effectively a win, a way to feel OK about the team’s long-term prospects while accelerating the departure of its obviously unfit coach. Those fans won big this Thanksgiving weekend, even if the Bears did not.

On Friday afternoon, the day after a total clock-management disaster resulted in a three-point loss to Detroit, the team canned Eberflus. He becomes the first-ever Bears head coach fired midseason, and he deserves that distinction. Thomas Brown, who was passing game coordinator three weeks ago before taking over as interim offensive coordinator from the fired Shane Waldron, was named interim head coach. Sometimes simply existing near incompetent people can really kickstart your career.

Final scores don’t always show how close a game was; that “record in one-score games” stat can be noisy. But if nothing else, Eberflus’s historically bad 5-19 record in those games called extra attention to his decision-making. In the second half of the Bears-Lions Thanksgiving game, Williams had his way with a depleted Lions defensive line. When he took the field at his own one-yard line with three-and-a-half minutes left to play, his team trailed just 23-20, and they'd scored 13 straight points in the fourth quarter. A defensive pass interference call on fourth-and-14 gave Chicago a fresh set of downs at the Lions' 25-yard line with just under a minute left and a timeout. The Bears were called for a penalty on second down, and on the replayed second down, an untouched Za'Darius Smith sacked Williams on a botched draw play to push the Bears back to the Lions 41, now fully out of kicker Cairo Santos’s range, but with the time and timeout to still get back in it.

The Bears did not use the timeout, but they somehow used all the time. When Williams took the sack, there were more than 30 seconds left on the game clock. But there were only six seconds left by the time Williams got the next snap off. His attempt to Rome Odunze, now improbably the final play of the game, fell incomplete, and it was over.

Some scene reporting: I went to this game and was minding the clock. But I figured I must have missed a late flag when no one else around me celebrated the incompletion. In fact these fans, unaided by the increasingly panicked Nantz-Romo booth (“You better hurry / Oh no—Jim, no! / This is disaster in the making here!”), just hadn’t considered that the Bears would let their time run out. Not even a fanbase also accustomed to really stupid endings could imagine one like that. 

Eberflus was typically unbothered in his postgame press conference. “I think we handled it the right way,” he said. The plan, Eberflus explained, was to snap the ball at 18 seconds, get into field-goal range and then call a timeout. Williams, in his postgame press conference, sounded like he didn’t even realize there was a timeout. The quarterback said he had changed the play at the line with 13 seconds left, feeling like 13 seconds wouldn’t be enough to run the original play. “I made an adjustment because I saw the clock running down, knowing that if we complete a ball inbounds or anything like that, we won't have time to kick a field goal or anything like that,” Williams said. Eberflus couldn't explain why he didn't intervene when things were obviously not going according to his plan and when it was clear Williams didn’t know the situation. “Once it gets under 12, you got to hold onto it then,” the coach said.

This all went over poorly with the players. “As the season was going, you just kind of figured that was going to happen,” receiver DJ Moore said on a Chicago radio show Monday morning when asked about the firing. “Thursday at the end of the game was the last straw, I feel like.” Moore also confirmed another story about defensive back Jaylon Johnson, who’d reportedly criticized Eberflus in the locker room after the loss. On the Fox Sports Sunday pregame show, Jay Glazer said that Johnson interrupted Eberflus's postgame speech and began “speaking in very colorful language” for “about 10-15 minutes.” Johnson “went crazy,” a Bears player told Adam Jahns and Dianna Russini of The Athletic. Other players joined in. “We felt as players it’s been too many instances where we fought our way back into games to lose because of bad time management and decision-making,” the Bears player said.

At a press conference Monday afternoon, general manager Ryan Poles and team president Kevin Warren explained the move. “When you look at the end-of-the-game situations, just some of the detailing to finish in those moments. We all know a lot of these games come down to those critical spots that we weren’t able to get over the hump,” Poles said. But the decision to open what Warren called “the most coveted job in the National Football League this year” evidently wasn’t a quick one. A couple hours before the team announced his firing, Eberflus held his regular press conference on Friday morning. “I’m confident I’ll be working onto [Week 14 opponent] San Francisco and getting ready for that game,” he told reporters who asked about his job security. The Bears have since deleted that video.