Bears coach Matt Eberflus did nothing Monday to quiet the roaring calls for his job or, at minimum, for him to take play calling away from offensive coordinator Shane Waldron. If anything, as has too often been the case in his tenure, he only made things worse by downplaying how bad the problems are and failing to provide any concrete answers.
While he offered little of substance, unless using the word “process” 12 times counts, it seems clear he’s moving on from Waldron through either firing or demotion.
Whereas one week earlier he flatly dismissed the idea of changing play callers, then watched his team lose 19-3 to the Patriots, Eberflus wouldn’t say Monday whether Waldron would still have a job come Wednesday.
Eberflus reiterated that “everything’s on the table” as far as considering personnel or staff changes, but insisted he didn’t want to rush to judgment less than 24 hours after losing to the Patriots.
If he can’t answer whether Waldron will remain on staff, though, that’s a strong signal he’s making a change.
In reality, the Bears have had trouble on offense throughout the course of the season, not merely against the Patriots. Players started speaking up after an ugly Week 3 loss to the Colts, and that subsided only temporarily during a three-game scoring outburst against some of the NFL’s worst defenses.
“I appreciate your opinion, for sure,” Eberflus said before rolling into a response about the team having played “winning football” and put “evidence on tape” of a cohesive offense while outscoring the Rams, Panthers and Jaguars 95-44 for three consecutive wins.
That was a month ago, and it’s not an “opinion” that those performances came with an asterisk. The Bears have scored 20 or more points — a low, low bar even with a rookie quarterback in Caleb Williams — four times this season. The defenses they did that against are ranked 32nd, 29th, 27th and 22nd.
Every time he does this, it weakens his standing. The simple playbook for navigating these storms of bad publicity is to acknowledge the problem, convey it’s being handled and close it out as quickly as possible. Eberflus often does the opposite, claiming it’s not as bad as it seems, giving vague solutions and letting these ordeals drag out unnecessarily.
It’s unlikely he had no clarity by Monday at noon on who would call plays given that game planning for the home game against the Packers on Sunday would’ve been underway by then. Had Eberflus said something definitive about Waldron’s future and announced a new play caller, perhaps passing game coordinator Thomas Brown, it would’ve shortened the shelf life of the story.
He committed a similar error just two weeks ago in dealing with Tyrique Stevenson’s situation. Rather than come out immediately with a plan to bench Stevenson for the start of the Cardinals game, Eberflus allowed it to bleed into a weeklong story when everyone was going to find out anyway once the game began.
He did it a year ago with Chase Claypool, choosing to implausibly keep afloat the possibility of him coming back to a team that had sent him home from a game and barred him from the building. That could’ve been over and done in a day, but it lasted all week.
And those aren’t even hard questions like the ones he got about former defensive coordinator Alan Williams’ mysterious resignation. Those are fairly run-of-the-mill topics for a head football coach.
Eberflus got an early start on whatever the opposite of damage control is when his when his weekly Monday morning appearance on ESPN 1000 with David Kaplan and Jonathan Hood went off the rails because of a bad phone connection.
On the third attempt, as Eberflus was responding to Kaplan calling this “a crisis,” his phone cut out again.
“Your cell phone is as bad as the offense right now,” Kaplan said before hilariously melting down on air.
It didn’t go much better in person a few hours later at Halas Hall. It rarely does. For someone who warns players about “outside noise,” as he did again Sunday, Eberflus frequently is responsible for turning up its volume.
Being an NFL head coach entails more than just strategy, and Eberflus’ ongoing inability to manage the way these problems look to the public makes it look like he’s in over his head in this job. He comes across as someone who doesn’t know what’s wrong or how to fix it, and most of the time that’s probably not true.
The alarming part is he’s known that for a long time and hasn’t improved. Eberflus acknowledged last season he hadn’t excelled as the public face and voice of the franchise and targeted that weakness for improvement in the offseason. It went only so far as a beard and a haircut.