It took 32 seconds of national embarrassment for George McCaskey, Kevin Warren and Ryan Poles to finally concede what everyone else already knew.
And even when the Chicago Bears brain trust decided they no longer could justify keeping Matt Eberflus as head coach of their team, they still waited until he conducted one more news conference — telling us everything was fine and he was preparing for next week’s game against the San Francisco 49ers — before they actually pulled the trigger.
Remember, this is an operation worth an estimated $6.4 billion, not a local hardware business trying to decide whether a store clerk should be let go for putting the wingnuts and screws in the wrong aisle.
Fittingly, the Bears were the Bears until the last drop.
“It’s been a normal operation,” Eberflus said Friday morning on a Zoom call with reporters before being Zoomed out of the NFL.
The sad part is the Bears truly believe they are a normal operation when it’s quite obvious they’re the laughingstock of football. Who else would let Eberflus continue to fail time and time again after he repeatedly proved he wasn’t fit for the job. His .304 winning percentage was third-worst in Bears history, ahead of only John Fox (.292) and Abe Gibron (.274).
And at least Abe had Melody to help take our minds off all the losing. (Google it, kids.)
Eberflus’ days had been numbered since the Hail Mary loss to the Washington Commanders. The 19-3 loss to the lowly New England Patriots on Nov. 10, in which he and his team were booed off the field, would’ve been a perfect time to say sayonara. The Bears had eight games remaining to try to salvage the season, and at 4-5 there was still some hope it could be done.
But, no, the McCaskeys don’t fire head coaches in season, we’ve been told a thousand times. Instead they got rid of the sacrificial goat, offensive coordinator Shane Waldron, who was replaced by Thomas Brown. Fans would have to suffer through three more brutal endings before George McCaskey finally got it into his head that this marriage was not going to work.
The Thanksgiving Day clock blunder will be remembered as the fatal blow, of course, because we all watched in a collective stupor as the clock ticked down and Caleb Williams kept barking out signals, seemingly oblivious to the fact the game was about to end. Even your Aunt Martha, who doesn’t know a football from a drumstick, was yelling: “What is he doing, for crying out loud?”
It made for an unforgettable Thanksgiving, with everyone in the living room calling for Eberflus’ head. Then came the “everything is fine” news conference Friday morning that made it appear as though the Bears were actually trying to gaslight their fans.
I’m not sure what made McCaskey agree to change the long-standing policy — whether it was Jimmy Johnson’s rant or a tweet by The Wieners Circle — but whoever it was should get a medal of valor for saving the city from a mass mental breakdown.
We all saw this coming, except perhaps the Three Amigos: McCaskey, Warren and Poles. That still doesn’t make it any more palatable.
The Thanksgiving hangover firing bookends the most famous “hiring” in Bears history, when Mike McCaskey told the media Dave McGinnis would be the head coach before actually informing McGinnis, thus losing both the coach and the rest of his own dwindling credibility. That embarrassing moment would be the lowlight of Mike McCaskey’s career, just as this will be remembered as George’s unshining moment.
How will Eberflus be remembered? Was he a poor man’s Pedro Grifol or a poorer man’s Jim Boylen?
Until Thursday’s debacle, perhaps the moment that best epitomized the Eberflus era was, during a lopsided loss to the Los Angeles Chargers in October 2023, when he threw the red challenge flag after the Bears scored a meaningless touchdown late in the game. He meant to throw it before the play, but Eberflus was never one to react quickly to any situation. And because there wasn’t any video replay of the actual touchdown, it was no harm, no foul.
What comes next for Bears fans is the hard part.
Do they trust these executives to hire the right replacement? Almost as much as they trust Mayor Brandon Johnson to manage the city budget.
The easiest solution is to throw money at Bill Belichick and see if he bites. If Williams is truly a game-changing quarterback then it makes sense to give the keys to the guy who coached the greatest quarterback of his generation.
But making sense is not really the Bears’ thing, so expect them to go for someone they don’t have to give any real power to and will be blander than their last five coaches combined. Someone disposable by 2027.
It’s just normal operating procedure at Halas Hall.
