Clock is ticking for Bears coach Matt Eberflus, who is under fire yet again
Matt Eberflus is running out of time to deliver definitive evidence that he’s the right man to run the Bears.
His team was in turmoil again this week, and that’s nothing new in his tenure. A month before that, offensive players intervened to shift coordinator Shane Waldron’s play calling into something more sensible. And last season was rife with troubling incidents, including late-game collapses, a mouthy malcontent in Chase Claypool and two assistant coaches leaving for non-football reasons.
Crisis has been the norm during the Eberflus years, and that’s a problem. There have been few periods of peace, and they’ve all been short-lived.
Heading into the Bears’ game Sunday at the Cardinals, Eberflus has the third-worst record in franchise history at 14-27. His team is 4-3 during the lighter half of its schedule, which gets tremendously tougher in two weeks. Other than the home game against the Patriots next week, every remaining Bears opponent currently is .500 or better.
When asked Friday about the stakes as his team teeters, Eberflus didn’t engage the question.
“I live week to week, and every game is a big game,” he said. “You put all your energy and all your focus into one game. That’s all you can do.”
But these individual games aren’t going particularly well, and there’s a sizable stack of them now.
His team threw away three games last season in which it had a double-digit lead in the fourth quarter. This season, the Bears lost a Week 3 game to the Colts in which opposing quarterback Anthony Richardson threw two interceptions and had a 39.0 passer rating and fell last week when cornerback Tyrique Stevenson abandoned his assignment on the Commanders’ game-winning Hail Mary.
For all the snags off the field, there have been plenty on it as well.
Eberflus is an excellent defensive play caller — he’s fresh off a couple of lapses on that front in the final sequence against the Commanders, however — but hasn’t proven much else. He has not been able to get the offense flowing, his game management is hit-and-miss, rookie quarterback Caleb Williams’ progress is unclear and he rarely conveys control publicly when the Bears hit turbulence.
It can’t be dismissed as merely “outside noise” when multiple team captains are speaking up.
Between the comments by tight end Cole Kmet, wide receiver DJ Moore, cornerback Jaylon Johnson and safety Kevin Byard, it’s clear some key Bears would like to see Eberflus do things differently on game day and in the practice week. And who knows what thoughts the players kept to themselves?
It already was a leap of faith for general manager Ryan Poles to retain Eberflus after last season, but it’s hard to imagine him betting his own tenure on Eberflus again if things don’t change. It’s harder still to imagine president Kevin Warren signing off on that.
The real test for Eberflus will come in the final eight games, when the Bears will run through the entire NFC North twice, plus the 49ers and Seahawks, and if his team must make meaningful progress during that stretch to justify him staying on for 2025.
As he said, all he can do at the moment is win the game in front of him. He cannot afford additional alarms going off against the Cardinals on Sunday — he’s 3-17 on the road — and then against the lowly Patriots. Given who they’ve played and who awaits them, the Bears already are behind schedule for their playoff push at 4-3.
And while that’s better than the 0-4 start last season or the 10-game losing streak to close out 2022, that’s a low bar. That can’t possibly be the standard at Halas Hall.
Eberflus will get the rest of the season, and perhaps he’ll turn things around. He’ll earn some credibility and deserve to stay if he does. But at this point, he has used up all his margin.