The Bears need to fire Matt Eberflus, but their problems are so much bigger

Matt Eberflus got a hair cut and grew a beard. The head coach of the Chicago Bears had to do something to distract the masses from his 10-24 overall record as it was announced he would return for his third season at one of the most critical junctures in franchise history.

The Bears selected Caleb Williams with the No. 1 overall pick in the 2024 NFL Draft thanks to a miraculous trade with the Carolina Panthers engineered a year earlier. Williams’ arrival represented a golden ticket for a franchise with perhaps the most pathetic quarterback history in the NFL, and it came with a call for the organization to be serious in the rest of its operations.

Keeping Eberflus was general manager’s Ryan Poles first big decision of the Williams era, and it risked repeating the same devastating mistake that plagued the team’s last two supposed saviors at quarterback. Mitch Trubisky and Justin Fields were both saddled with lame duck head coaches as rookies who should have been fired a year earlier. For Eberflus to avoid the same fate, he was going to need a lot more than a good barber.

Eberflus’ Bears walked the tightrope of NFL’s razor thin margins of success to start the season. When Jayden Daniels dropped back to pass on the final play of a Week 8 matchup with the Washington Commanders, the Bears had a 96.2 percent chance at holding a 5-2 overall record to start the season. The playoffs were within reach, Eberflus’s defense was cooking, and Williams had done enough make Chicago believe he would live up to the hype.

Then Daniels connected on a Hail Mary. Suddenly, Chicago was 4-3 with a cascade of finger pointing taking over the locker room. Eberflus failed to take accountability for keeping all his timeouts in his back pocket as DB Tyrique Stevenson went viral for celebrating too early. He doubled-down on not being bothered to defend easy completions to the sideline on the previous two downs that put Washington within range of an end zone shot. He even scolded his own star for rightfully blasting a bizarre goal line carry by a backup offensive lineman that ended in a back-breaking fumble.

The Bears were falling apart at the seams as they entered their Week 9 matchup with Arizona Cardinals. This would be the ultimate test of Eberflus’ leadership ability. He again failed with flying colors.

The Cardinals beat the Bears, 29-9, in what feels like the end of an era in Chicago.

In just two short weeks, the Bears have fallen from an ascendant young team punching above its weight to a dysfunctional mess in need of another new coaching staff. Chicago looked unprepared and undisciplined in Arizona, putting up a lifeless display on both sides of the football befitting of a team that’s quit on its coach.

The Bears couldn’t score a touchdown against a Cardinals team that entered 26th in total defense. Williams was running for his life behind a banged up offensive line that was terrible even when it was fully healthy. The scheme put together by offensive coordinator Shane Waldron was again a disaster, completely ignoring tight end Cole Kmet, over-indexing on a suddenly washed-looking Keenan Allen, and being unable to find anything easy to get its quarterback going. Williams, in fairness, missed throws, too. He’s playing tentative football right now. The fear is that he’s learning bad habits from a dead staff walking that he’ll have to fight against when the Bears mercifully hire someone new.

The Bears looked like a team playing through a Hail Mary hangover all afternoon. Reports circulated before the game that Stevenson would be benched in a disciplinary move. That may have been fine if Eberflus handled his business efficiently, but instead Stevenson’s reaction was still a top story in the minutes before kickoff against the Cardinals.

The Eberflus era officially died with 12 seconds remaining in the first half. Emari Demercado somehow busted a 53-yard touchdown run up the middle of the Bears’ soft zone defense to deliver a nail in the coffin before halftime. Eberflus said he was playing the pass, presumably guarding against another Hail Mary. Giving up a scoring run like this is even more embarrassing.

An ugly game got even worse when Williams came up limping after being hit on his last drop back of the game. Why was Williams even still playing? How is the staff putting him in position to take hits in garbage time? Eberflus simply isn’t talented enough as a tactician to make up for such sloppy unforced errors every week.

At this point, Chicago is a .500 team that doesn’t really have an identity it can hang its hat on.

Eberflus is now 14-28 as the Bears’ head coach. Chicago still hasn’t faced a divisional opponent yet in the mighty NFC North. This thing is going to get uglier before it gets any better, and it already feels like Chicago’s season is over.

A year ago, Eberflus blew three 10-plus point fourth quarter leads, which is tied for the most such losses in a season in NFL history. He saw two coaches abruptly leave the team in the middle of the season, one fired for workplace behavior, and the other canned for reasons that remain undiscovered to this day. He hired Luke Getsy and then Shane Waldron as offensive coordinators, and both flopped. He kept Chris Morgan as offensive line coach. All of these failures reflect directly back on Eberflus, which would feel like a saving grace if it wasn’t so obvious he should have been fired after last season.

At this point, there’s no saving Flus. Williams will have to learn another new system going into his second pro season. The bigger problem is the Bears simply have no idea how to evaluate what makes a successful NFL head coach, and it threatens to be the big thing that could derail an impressive roster put together by Poles.

The Bears could have turned the page on a losing regime before the season and given Williams an offense-leaning head coach to begin his pro career. Instead, they stuck with a milquetoast incumbent with a special ability to lose winnable games. If they couldn’t execute a seemingly obvious decision last year, why should fans trust them to get their next head coach right?

The Bears have never fired a head coach in the middle of the season. Eberflus deserves it, but his staff is so underwhelming that it lacks a worthy interim replacement. This head coach was a problem that could have been dealt with before this season. It’s coming back to haunt the Bears now.