The Bears made history on Friday, firing a coach during the season for the first time in franchise history. Making history, however, can be a little clunky.
Meeting with reporters on Friday, Bears CEO Kevin Warren acknowledged that firing Matt Eberflus after Eberflus conducted a day-after-game press conference during which he expressed confidence that he’d remain on the job wasn’t ideal.
“In retrospect could we have done it better?” Warren said, via David Haugh of 670 The Score. “Yes. But we were trying to be respectful.”
The concern was that delaying the Friday morning press conference would have ignited a brush fire of speculation, with aggressive efforts by reporters to figure out what was going on. The Bears preferred to have time to decide whether to make the change, without causing chaos.
They still could have postponed it. Or they could have expedited the decision-making process, treating the start of the press conference as the deadline for figuring out what to do.
At a deeper level, and as explained during Monday’s PFT Live, there’s a sense of optimism in the building. The optimism flows from the fact that ownership has begun to make good on its promise to change. The firing of Eberflus during the season — in lieu of deciding he’ll be fired after the season and implementing the move after weeks of uncertainty and leaks — marks a break from past behavior by the Bears. It suggests to those who are now running the show in Chicago that ownership is on board with what they’re trying to do.
The next step will be hiring a coach with the goal of getting the most out of rookie quarterback Caleb Williams. The Bears have seen enough to believe that he is the guy. This points to the hiring of a coach with an offensive background, with the goal of joining the new coach and Williams at the hip for the next decade or longer.
While nothing, we’re told, has been ruled out at this point, that’s the way to get the most out of Williams. And it would be a surprise if the Bears hire anyone but someone who will be constantly working with Williams on the field and off in order to design and implement an offense that gets the most out of his skills.
