The Chicago Bears have a quarterback.
They don’t have an owner.
They don’t have a head coach.
They don’t have an offensive coordinator.
They don’t have an offensive line.
There were rumors of a general manager, but those have disappeared.
Perhaps you can see the problem. With no support or direction, a kid destined for Broadway stardom has been reduced to being a busker on a dangerous corner.
Caleb Williams can thank the McCaskey family for his current, dismal status, because it starts at the top. The “it” I refer to is a cluelessness and inflexibility that, put in the hands of behavioral scientists, would fill several textbooks. An owner who keeps hiring the same kind of people despite a long history of poor results is an owner disconnected from reality.
This is not about the McCaskeys and a familial lack of knowledge about football. It’s about the McCaskeys and a familial lack of understanding about people. How they ended up with head coach Matt Eberflus isn’t a mystery. What do you see when you watch Eberflus during press conferences? A seemingly nice fellow whose goal is to say nothing of substance about a broken team.
The McCaskeys have two words for that kind of coach: You’re hired!
They want to look at their head coach and see themselves, which is wonderful if you’re looking for a philanthropist but not so good if you’re looking for someone to lead a football team. I won’t list the Bears head coaches since Mike Ditka because they’re balled up into the same guy and because I don’t want to depress Bears fans any more than they’re clinically depressed.
It’s not surprising that the McCaskey family ends up with coaches who reflect their buttoned-up approach to life, but it is surprising that chairman George McCaskey has never hinted, even accidentally, that he has no idea what he’s doing. You’d think this much failure would lead to some soul-searching. You’d think he’d slip and admit during a rare media interview that he’d rather be gardening, umpiring youth baseball games or doing just about anything else than running an NFL franchise. But, no. Nothing.
Eberflus fired offensive coordinator Shane Waldron on Tuesday. The Bears hadn’t scored a touchdown in their previous two games. Even they could see that a lack of TDs is a problem in football. Barring a miraculous turnaround, Eberflus will be fired after this season, something McCaskey should have done after last season. But the Bears had shown signs of life late in 2023, and even though everything pointed to a do-not-resuscitate order somewhere in Eberflus’ employment file, the chairman retained him.
Now the Bears are paying the price. They play the Packers on Sunday, the first game in an extremely difficult second-half schedule. Blood donors are needed.
What comes after Eberflus? “More of the same’’ seems like the obvious answer.
The McCaskeys prefer head coaches with no previous NFL head-coaching experience. Those coaches come cheaper, and they tend to be more subservient. Ownership doesn’t want anybody rocking the boat, even when it’s sinking. In the McCaskey era, only John Fox (2015-17) had previous head coaching experience in the league. He made up for that sin by being predictably bland and unsuccessful in Chicago.
The instinct is to say that the McCaskeys are only in it for the money, but they don’t seem to be in it for spending the money on themselves. You could understand if they were laughing all the way to the bank in their Maseratis. But they’re not conspicuous consumers by any stretch of the imagination.
It’s so like McCaskey to be hunkered down with plans to build a gleaming stadium while the on-field product is in shambles. A stadium involves steel and cement, not people and football. Call me naive, but I don’t think it’s about the billions of dollars a new building will churn out for George and the family. It’s about staying busy, having a project, doing their part.
A cynic would suggest that a stadium, not a Super Bowl champion, seems to be the franchise’s main goal. Any cynics around here?
The Bears do indeed have a quarterback. For now. Williams was sacked nine times in a loss to the Patriots on Sunday, after being sacked six times the week before. The team doesn’t have the foggiest how to protect this year’s No. 1 overall pick or how to develop him.
On Wednesday, the Bears waived guard Nate Davis, whom general manager Ryan Poles had given a three-year, $30 million contract to in March 2023.
And so it goes.