Matt Eberflus doesn’t really have a rival in coaching, but he’s about to find one in Matt LaFleur.
When Eberflus takes the Bears to Lambeau Field on Sunday, it’ll be the beginning of a long-term chess match between the two head coaches. LaFleur’s dominance of Matt Nagy — a 6-0 record and 75-point scoring differential — was one of the reasons this job was open for Eberflus.
He said this week the Packers never came up in his interviews with Bears chairman George McCaskey, but it’s so obvious that it didn’t need to be stated. It’s imperative that the Bears catch up to the Packers, and between LaFleur and quarterback Aaron Rodgers, that’s going to be difficult.
But if Eberflus is going to coach the Bears for the next decade, as he envisions, he’ll need to outfox LaFleur along the way. It’s nearly impossible to keep this job long without landing punches against the Packers.
Like the Packers, the Bears hoped they had a young, offensive hotshot in Nagy who could turn their offense into a machine that could keep pace with Rodgers. He couldn’t.
The Bears’ new approach is to pair an experienced, defensive-minded head coach in Eberflus with an offensive coordinator they stole straight from LaFleur’s staff in Luke Getsy. They literally have the Packers’ playbook.
“Certainly you have the insight of that, but it’s still gonna come down to execution,” Eberflus said. “You’re still gonna have to make the plays when you need to make them and you’re still gonna have to play fundamentally sound.
“When you’re playing against a quarterback that’s this experienced and this good, if you make a mistake, he’s gonna make you pay.”
There are only so many quarterbacks who force a defense to play perfectly to beat them and, “what makes this league special is guys like that,” Eberflus said.
LaFleur has been so superb, though, that he has begun to stake his claim as a significant part of the equation for the Packers’ success. At 43, he is already 39-11 and off to the best start to a coaching career in league history. There’s good cause for the Packers to feel good about him eventually leading their post-Rodgers future.
Eberflus and LaFleur first faced off as coordinators in 2017, when LaFleur ran the Rams’ offense and Eberflus was the Cowboys’ linebackers coach and passing defense coordinator. The Rams won 35-30.
They met twice in 2018 with Eberflus steering the Colts’ defense and LaFleur as the Titans’ offensive coordinator, and Eberflus won those two games by a combined score of 71-27.
His Colts also held off the Packers 34-31 in overtime in 2020. Eberflus seemed like he decoded something about Rodgers in that game. After giving up 28 points in the first half, the Colts held him to an 83.7 passer rating the rest of the game. Rodgers said he watched that game this week, but wasn’t sure how useful it was because the personnel is totally different from what he’ll see Sunday.
Eberflus felt the same way about preparing for LaFleur, saying there’s nothing to draw from facing him when he was with other teams.
“There’s a system that they’re in, but the system highlights the skill,” Eberflus said.
The skill is the biggest concern for the Bears. Their defense has rarely matched Rodgers’ skill, and now they’re going at him with a roster full of uncertainty. Rookie cornerback Kyler Gordon and safety Jaquan Brisker, for example, have looked good so far, but they’ll need to be perfect against Rodgers.
So will Eberflus. The path to taking over the NFC North goes through Green Bay, Rodgers and LaFleur. And even if it turns out that the Bears aren’t ready to topple the Packers yet, Eberflus must show from the start he has a better handle on them than his predecessors did.
