On what was the Bears’ most important remaining moment of the 2023 regular season, with roughly 30 seconds to play and a chance to send the division-rival Lions to overtime, Justin Fields dropped back in the most obvious passing situation one can fathom. His rookie right tackle, Darnell Wright, was on an island trying to anchor down against Aidan Hutchinson, one of the best pass rushers in the NFL.
And, as one might imagine, just a few seconds later, Wright found himself kicking a loose football through the back of the end zone for a safety. Before Fields had the chance, before the Bears could regain a sense of on-field competence, the Lions capped a massive comeback from down 12 points with a little more than four minutes to play. Fields was strip-sacked and stripped of an opportunity to cauterize the growing narrative that Chicago will eventually replace him with one of its two likely top-five draft picks in April.
This was just one of the handful of unforced errors the Bears committed Sunday, which obscured a spirited performance from coach Matt Eberflus’s defense. The Bears picked off Jared Goff three times, sacked him twice and hit him eight times. The team was up 26–14 at the 4:15 mark of the fourth quarter.
David Reginek/USA TODAY Sports
Maybe Eberflus, like Fields, was flirting with the idea of quieting some of the noise around his ability to lead the Bears long term. Instead, he likely solidified his future pink slip.
With historic draft capital en route to continue the process of reviving this franchise, the Bears learned Sunday that Eberflus cannot be the person to pilot a rebuild of this magnitude. Staring down at one of the most multifaceted and effective offenses in the NFL, Eberflus’s team took fewer than 30 seconds off the clock before Detroit’s game-winning drive, allowing the Lions to utilize a full complement of run plays on the drive. Despite Goff’s showing discomfort in myriad opportunities to drop back without a running game at his disposal, the Bears ran the ball up the middle twice for no gain, and allowed Fields to take a deep shot on third down (more on that later).
Eberflus seemed overly content with field goals, kicking one on fourth-and-1 at the beginning of the fourth quarter and later running the ball on a third-and-7, parallel parking the offense into field goal range again instead of being aggressive with a quarterback who was rushing for nearly six yards per carry.
The strange clock mismanagement and strategic lack of aggression was familiar to those who watched the club melt down against the Broncos earlier this season to fall to 0–4. Chicago now has six wins in Eberflus’s two seasons. None of them have come against a divisional opponent. Outside of the mud bowl victory over the 49ers at the tail end of the Trey Lance era to start the 2022 season, the Bears have not beaten what someone might consider a “quality” opponent (only the 2022 Texans and Patriots; and the ’23 Commanders, Raiders and Panthers).
Sunday was Fields’s return from injury and the Bears nearly beat one of the best teams in football. The third-year QB finished with a rating above 100, with one touchdown and no interceptions, plus 104 yards rushing. He was by far the better quarterback on the field Sunday, and his completion percentage over expectation was higher than his season average (from before his injury) by almost seven points. If we are really stretching for compliments, Fields missed that third-down, game-icing throw to Tyler Scott by the width of a fingernail, which, if you compared that exact moment to a Lions game a year ago in which the defense was similarly daring Fields to throw deep, represented a marked improvement in his confidence and decision-making ability.
However, the Bears are no longer in a situation where the team can magnify such moments of progress without exposing how paltry that progress is when juxtaposed by their on-field deployment and management. There is undoubtedly talent on the field. The front office has hit on multiple picks outside the first round (Jaquan Brisker, Braxton Jones and Kyler Gordon) to supplement a roster that now has foundational players at many of the key positions (including trade acquisitions DJ Moore and Montez Sweat).
Chicago would be one of the more desirable coaching jobs of the 2024 cycle should it open, which almost certainly guarantees that it will.
Contrary to popular belief, as someone who covers the coaching industry closely, writing that a coach should no longer hold a job is not a dream scenario. Eberflus was, and is, a cutting-edge defensive mind. There is little doubt he would be a first-choice coordinator for someone fielding a coaching staff in 2024.
But the Lions game again displayed that line between someone who can and cannot put the larger picture together. With two picks in the top five on tap, Chicago has itself in a position to field a dream team. Now, the challenge is finding someone who can coach it.
