Bears head coach Matt Eberflus threw his challenge flag twice on Sunday night, and he lost both challenges as replays clearly showed that both calls on the field were correct. That raised the question: Why doesn’t Eberflus have someone in his ear who’s looking at the replays and telling him whether or not to challenge?
Eberflus says the Bears do that, and do it well most of the time, but on both challenges Sunday night, it was hard to get a good look at the replay in time.
“We have a good process for that,” Eberflus said. “It’s a little bit different when you can’t see the monitor right away, and it’s a critical play like a third down or a takeaway, so we do put a little more weight on those, but we have a good process.”
One of the plays Eberflus challenged was a Texans conversion on third down that the Bears thought was incomplete but wasn’t. The other was a Texans incompletion that Eberflus thought the Bears intercepted. In both cases, Eberflus said they were potentially big enough plays that it was worth it to challenge.
“We’ve been pretty clean overall since we’ve been here, those were just situations where we didn’t get a great look at it, and they were critical downs, so we made a decision to do it, and it didn’t work out,” Eberflus said.
Eberflus said just as last week’s big comeback win was exhilarating, this week’s close loss was disappointing.
“We’re all disappointed in the loss, and we should be,” Eberflus said. “In the NFL it’s how you respond that matters, and you don’t have a lot of time to do that. . . . What I was most proud of was that the guys fought all the way to the end, and we had a chance to win the game to the last possession. We didn’t get that done in the end.”
