Thomas Brown was talking through the massive task ahead of him in his second news conference as Chicago Bears interim head coach.
How can he affect a team on a six-game losing streak? How does he plan to balance offensive play calling with head coach duties on game day? How can he further quarterback Caleb Williams’ development? How does he look at the grand opportunity in front of him to show the NFL what he’s all about?
But about four minutes in, when considering the most notable changes around Halas Hall since the Bears fired coach Matt Eberflus, Brown veered down a lighthearted tangent — about weight loss. At 225 pounds early in November, Brown was trying to cut weight. It turned out being named offensive coordinator to replace Shane Waldron was just what he needed.
“You increase tasks to your day, you forget about food,” Brown said later. “I went a couple days and just really didn’t eat, didn’t really think about it, wasn’t hungry. I was thinking about the next moment, what to say to this player, doing game planning and I look up and I’m almost 30 pounds down. So we’ll keep going, see how long it lasts.”
Brown was told he should market the unorthodox plan that has him down to 205 pounds.
“I’ll write a book and we’ll see,” Brown said. “I hope you guys buy it. I’ll probably be pretty pissed if you don’t buy it.”
The ensuing laughter was a surprising sound amid all the dreariness in Lake Forest lately. It’s that presence from Brown as the Bears’ new temporary leader that has players buying into his message ahead of their road game Sunday against the San Francisco 49ers.
Multiple players said Brown’s direct and clear approach to communication, his energy and his focus on accountability and unity have helped ease the transition from Eberflus, who was fired Nov. 29 after posting a 14-32 record in 2½ seasons.
“(Brown) is very deliberate in how he talks to us,” left guard Teven Jenkins said. “Everything he’s telling us right now is very intentional and all of us are very locked in. Everybody is sitting at the front of their seat, leaning in.”
To be clear, that presence is not necessarily going to help Brown balance coordinator and head coach duties on game day. It doesn’t mean he’s going to formulate winning game plans or make better late-game decisions than the ones that ultimately led to the demise of Eberflus. That all remains to be seen.
But it was Step 1 in steadying the upheaval at Halas Hall this week after the Bears fired a head coach midseason for the first time in team history.
Now, Brown and the players hope to ride his spark and put an end to a maddening string of losses that have turned their season upside down.
A historically difficult task
Brown doesn’t so much avoid the topic as indicate that he can’t really be concerned about it in this most hectic of all months.
He interviewed for head coaching vacancies before — with the Miami Dolphins in 2022, the Houston Texans in 2023 and the Tennessee Titans in 2024.
The former Los Angeles Rams assistant head coach under Sean McVay and the Carolina Panthers offensive coordinator last season, Brown knows he’ll be assessed across the league for how he steps in for Eberflus. He surely knows the Bears, who promoted him twice in less than three weeks, will keep him on their candidate list for their next head coach if he handles himself well. And he knows his work between now and Jan. 6 may earn him consideration for other openings around the NFL.
But he is focused on this job over the next month.
“I’ve always had the thought process of every job I’ve had, try to excel at a high level,” Brown said. “What I realized about this profession is if you are bad at your job, they move on from you. If you’re good at your job, they give you an opportunity to stay around. If you’re great at your job, you get elevated. So my thought process was always to be the best I can be — not make it about myself — and let the chips fall where they may.”
Bears President Kevin Warren gave Brown a strong endorsement Monday in talking about the coaching change and upcoming search, calling him bright, hardworking, talented, decisive and clear with “great leadership capabilities.”
But nobody around Halas Hall will pretend that what lies ahead for Brown is easy.
Interim coaches almost always are asked to step in because there are serious issues within a team — and the outcomes usually reflect that. In turn, the interims more often than not don’t return the next season.
According to the Washington Post, from 1990-2021 interim coaches compiled a 111-209 record. Only 13 interim coaches — of the 46 the Post counted since 1990 — were hired into the teams’ full-time roles the next season.
Las Vegas Raiders coach Antonio Pierce was the only interim coach of six from 2022-23 to be hired to the full-time job when he was promoted in January 2024. And there is speculation around the league that his job could be in jeopardy after the season.
Brown is one of three NFL interims this season, joining Jeff Ulbrich with the New York Jets and Darren Rizzi with the New Orleans Saints.
He’s accepting of the hand he has been dealt.
“I said at the beginning, I wanted to thank God for the opportunity that he’s presented me with because I can’t complain about prayers being answered in certain different orders,” Brown said. “Maybe it’s not the ideal scenario, but I live every day to be at my best for those around me. Every job I’ve had that’s led me to the future is based on the current work I do. So that’s all I care about.
“I’m not worried about what happens in five weeks. … It’s not even in my thought process. I’m focused on this very moment and how to do the best job I can for this football team to help lead these guys the right way and go have success.”
How Brown leads Williams over the next month is as valuable as anything.
‘He knows what he wants’
After his second game with Brown as offensive coordinator, Williams hesitated to use the word — but then decided it fit. Brown has “a certain aura to him,” Williams said, that allows the quarterback to play free.
“He knows what he wants,” Williams said. “You know he knows what he wants.”
Brown was a self-described introvert growing up. He wasn’t shy as much as quiet, someone who kept to himself.
But he has grown to find his voice, first through the communication required during 16 years of marriage to his wife, Jessica, then through parenting three sons, each with unique personalities that require different approaches.
“It’s about still being my authentic self but also (knowing) how to deliver a message,” he said. “I’m never going to lie to you. I’m going to tell you the truth, but how I deliver it is based on what brings the best out of you.”
His communication with Williams is key as the Bears try to help the quarterback squeeze the most out of the rest of his rookie season.
In three games with Brown as his play caller, Williams has completed 64% of his passes for 827 yards and five touchdowns. He hasn’t thrown an interception in six games. And he has made clutch fourth-quarter plays to keep the Bears in games late.
Those are promising results against three solid NFC North defenses and certainly a step up from the previous three games that helped prompt the Waldron firing. Williams didn’t throw for more than 217 yards in a game, and the Bears totaled just 27 points in those three contests.
There are still issues to iron out.
The Bears offense, which has been slow to start games for much of the season under Williams, didn’t score in the first half and totaled just 53 yards before halftime against the Detroit Lions in Eberflus’ last game. Williams said Wednesday that he wasn’t moving with enough urgency at the end of the game, when the Bears got just one play off in the final 32 seconds despite having a timeout. He said he also wasn’t on the same page as coaches about the play they wanted to run to set up a potential tying field goal.
But there have been more reasons than not to believe the union is working.
Quarterbacks coach Kerry Joseph said Brown’s clear and concise communication methods have helped to simplify things for Williams, “the way it hits Caleb’s brain, the way he sees it.” And Joseph believes the confidence with which Brown delivers his plans — and his emphasis on how they prepare — have rubbed off on Williams in the right way. Brown has stated more than once that he wants Williams to play with “no fear.”
“When you have that as a player, you feel that,” Joseph said. “As coaches around him, you feel that — just that, ‘Hey, you can run through that wall if you choose to,’ ” Joseph said. “That’s the confidence and command he’s brought in the room. It’s infectious. It spreads. He has put his DNA on it, and guys are walking in and believing in it.”
Williams said last month that he didn’t have a lot of one-on-one talks with Brown when he was the passing game coordinator. The Bears, while trying to limit the number of voices in Williams’ ear in his rookie season, instead stressed his relationships with Eberflus and Waldron.
Tracking Caleb Williams: How the Chicago Bears QB is performing in his rookie season
When Brown took over for Waldron, he called the quarterback to lay out what Williams could expect from him and vice versa. He said the relationship required some “blind trust” to get moving so quickly in the middle of the season. Williams didn’t initially have the comfort that comes with working with a coordinator for months, for example being at ease with expressing when he doesn’t like a play call.
They’re working on getting more comfortable.
“I’m a pretty direct person,” Brown said. “That can come off different ways to different people. But he is not soft, which I appreciate. Me and soft people sometimes don’t always see eye to eye, get along. But he likes being challenged, likes being coached.
“I’m definitely all about encouraging, uplifting our guys when it comes to doing things the right way, but it’s finding a balance (between) we have made some great improvements, great strides, but being good is not to be confused with good enough. So I can be better. He can be better. The entire group can be better.”
Williams has been appreciative of how demanding Brown is of young players and veterans alike.
“One of the most important things is accountability,” Williams said. “He’s done a solid job so far with that and holding me accountable, holding all the guys accountable. And just how he is. He’s a lead-by-example type of guy, and that’s been great.”
Now the Bears must see if the leadership extends to the whole team on game day.
‘No fear’
A few days ago, McVay reached out to Brown to talk with him about his new opportunity.
Brown worked for three seasons under McVay from 2020-22, first as the running backs coach, then as the assistant head coach and tight ends coach. He was a part of the 2021 Rams Super Bowl-winning team.
Brown, a former running back at Georgia, listed a few coaches who have made an impact on him over his 14 seasons of coaching at the collegiate and NFL levels. He was the running backs coach under offensive coordinator Andy Ludwig at Wisconsin and studied how to marry the run and pass. He learned from Mark Richt as the running backs coach at Georgia and the offensive coordinator at Miami. He valued his time learning how to be a communicator, leader and teacher with senior assistant Jim Caldwell in Carolina last year.
But McVay is his biggest influence, both in how to design an offense and use personnel but also how to lead. He learned “the really good stuff” about how to be consistent and own the room but also lean on the people around him.
Brown obviously made an impression on McVay, who at 38 years old is the same age and played against Brown in high school in Georgia. He told Los Angeles reporters last week that he always thought Brown would be a head coach at some point.
“There are just certain people when you watch (them), you’re like, ‘Man, they’re a little different’ in terms of the competitiveness, the spirit, the never-say-die attitude,” McVay said. “And then just his overall presence in general is impressive. A good way to articulate it is he commands respect by the way he handles himself, and he gives it back.”
That command will be put under a much bigger spotlight when he takes on his first game as interim head coach Sunday.
Brown was matter of fact in the week leading up to his debut about how he is handling his expanded duties.
He is not a micromanager, he said, so he will not do a lot of meddling with defensive coordinator Eric Washington and his staff as they navigate their first game without Eberflus as defensive play caller. Brown already has been working closely with newly named offensive coordinator Chris Beatty, also the wide receivers coach, over the last three games. But they’ve added discussions about in-game situations, such as clock management, over the last week as they try to purge some of the issues of the past.
Wide receiver Keenan Allen said Thursday that late-game decisions — and accountability from the coaching staff on some of those decisions — were some of the biggest frustrations for players under Eberflus.
When asked if he thinks accountability will be better under Brown, Allen said, “We’ve got to wait to see, but yeah, I do.”
That’s the hopeful attitude many players have taken this week as they deal with the change and try to finish the season off right.
Defensive end DeMarcus Walker believes in Brown’s direct, transparent, “grown men” approach to communication. And he’s behind Brown as he tries to help them put an end to a losing streak they think is not indicative of their talent.
“We love his energy and his demeanor and attitude he brings for us as a team,” Walker said. “Obviously ever since he’s been calling plays, he’s brought a different level to it. And we’ve got his back.”
When Brown considered what he wants the Bears’ identity to be under his leadership, he said he has “more of a defensive mentality, even as an offensive guy.” He wants players to understand the physicality they need to play with and the discipline they need to have when they apply themselves.
And he wants them to maximize their next opportunity.
“Life isn’t guaranteed; this game isn’t guaranteed,” Brown said. “It’s a privilege to be here, so I want us to maximize it every single day in the building. And when we have an opportunity to excel on game day, go cut it loose, man. Play with no fear.”
Brown is approaching his big moment the same way.
