The upcoming offseason is the most pivotal for the Bears in a long time, and they better be ready for it the moment their season finale in Green Bay ends. That’s in less than a month.
While the Bears are just 5-8 going into their game Sunday at the Browns and are tied for the fifth-worst record in the NFL, they’ve shown they have some promising pieces. The secondary has a chance to be one of the league’s best, the offensive line is improved, wide receiver DJ Moore is in the prime of his career and other aspects are headed in the right direction.
Those factors likely secure general manager Ryan Poles as new team president Kevin Warren makes his end-of-season evaluations. So those two will work together to make decisions on coach Matt Eberflus, offensive coordinator Luke Getsy and quarterback Justin Fields.
But all of those choices are interdependent, making it very complicated and very urgent. If a team is firing its coach or a coordinator, that usually happens right after the season ends, and Poles’ decision on Fields is wrapped up in that, so he needs to know which way he’s going at quarterback at the same time he’s making the call on his coaching staff.
Poles doesn’t necessarily need to declare his intentions publicly that early, but he needs to be able to tell either his current coaches or the candidates who would replace them what he’s going to do.
Assuming the Bears do get the No. 1 pick in the draft via the Panthers, which looks highly likely, they’ll have months to decide who to pick. But they need to know immediately if that someone will be a quarterback. If a new offensive-minded head coach is coming in, for example, he’s almost certainly going to want to draft a quarterback rather than inherit one.
There are several interwoven factors to consider, here’s a look at everything the Bears must take into account:
Fields, Getsy don’t fit
Of all the aspects of this scenario, the clearest is that the Bears can’t bring back Getsy and Fields together. Ask Getsy if this is his ideal quarterback. Probably not. Ask Fields if this is his ideal coordinator. Probably not.
One or both must go, or the Bears can expect more of the same. They’re an offense that struggles to pass (26th in yards per game this season) and struggles in general (20th in points). They’ve topped 20 points in four of Fields’ nine starts this season (15 times in his 34 career starts). Regardless of whether Getsy is limiting Fields or scheming around his deficiencies, this combination simply is untenable.
That takes the “run it back” option off the table. Poles recently said on the team-run pre-game show he believes the Bears are “really close to not only being an elite defense, but being an elite team.” Be careful about falling in love with a middling team, which is what the Bears have been lately, even at their best. That’s a Ryan Pace mistake. The defense is very good, but just two games ago the offense mustered 12 points on four field goals and narrowly avoided defeat against the Vikings.
Fields forever
If Poles believes in Fields, as a good segment of the fan base does, replacing Getsy is obvious. But it’s also difficult.
The Bears will be very limited in offensive coordinator candidates when those coaches will still be under Eberflus, as opposed to potentially getting head-coaching interviews elsewhere. The field also will shrink when factoring in that a quarterback who still has question marks is entrenched versus getting to be part of a group that will shape a top prospect like Southern Cal’s Caleb Williams or North Carolina’s Drake Maye.
If the Bears are hiring for the head job with a highly touted rookie quarterback that they’ll be integral in choosing, top offensive coordinators like the Lions’ Ben Johnson will be in play. If Eberflus and Fields stay, it’s more likely they’ll be interviewing upstart quarterbacks coaches to be their offensive coordinator.
Also important: the Bears would be asking Fields to learn his third offense in four seasons. That’s a tough adjustment even for a smart quarterback like him. The challenge was evident last season as he adapted to Getsy’s offense, which included changing his footwork to better fit the timing routes in that scheme.
Is Fields enough?
It’s possible for the Bears to see Fields progressing and still not be satisfied with where that will get them. When Poles got the No. 1 pick this year, he said he’d have to be “blown away” by one of the prospects to move on from Fields. His new criteria should be that Fields has to blow him away to stay.
Fields looks like he’s improving — all his passing numbers are on track for career highs — but there’s still the question of how high his ceiling is. Is he as good as Tua Tagovailoa, Josh Allen and fellow 2021 first-rounder Trevor Lawrence, for example? Because those players’ teams still aren’t sure if they have a shot at the Super Bowl this season.
The list of the NFL’s top 10 quarterbacks is full of players who have won an MVP or contended for one and are expected to be perennially in the mix for it. It’s imperative to be great at quarterback, not just good. The Texans gave themselves hope of one day competing against the Patrick Mahomes and Jalen Hurts of the world by drafting C.J. Stroud this year.
Every team should have a high bar for finding a franchise quarterback. If Poles sees more potential in Williams, Maye or someone else, he can’t be content with Fields.
Conviction in Eberflus, Getsy
All Poles has said throughout the last two seasons, despite Eberflus’ 8-22 record, is that he’s supremely confident in him. And given that the offensive coordinator theoretically has to coach the offense in a way that Eberflus approves of, perhaps he believes in Getsy, too.
But does Poles believe in either or both of them enough to entrust them with a rare quarterback prospect? Poles’ next move at quarterback almost certainly will define his tenure with the Bears, and that’d be putting a ton of faith in an unproven coaching staff.
That path also potentially presents a recurring problem for the Bears. Suppose they draft a quarterback, but the team still doesn’t win next season. Then Poles almost certainly has to change coaches, which would mean he’d stick the incoming coaches with a freshly drafted quarterback. It’s exactly what happened to Eberflus with Fields, and before him with Matt Nagy and Mitch Trubisky.
Regardless of how they keep getting there, it’s not healthy for the Bears to have their coaches and quarterbacks on different timelines.
Total reset option
And that points toward another structural issue: The Bears have built themselves backwardly from the bottom up.
Fields arrived in 2021. Poles and Eberflus came aboard a year later, and even then it looked like chairman George McCaskey went out of order by interviewing coaching candidates before hiring Poles. Poles might disagree, but it appeared that Eberflus was a finalist before Poles was in place as general manager.
Then, a year after that, the Bears hired Warren.
Whether it’s a manufacturing company, an accounting firm or a football team, it’s supposed to go the other way. So if Warren wants to topple the entire core of the football side of the organization and set up the pieces to his liking from the top down, no one could blame him.
Warren could be here for a decade. No one else can say that with certainty. He should dictate the direction of the franchise.
That said, another total overhaul seems highly unlikely. A lot of Poles’ draft picks and other acquisitions have been good ones, and Warren has spoken glowingly about him. Warren would be more likely to fully attach himself to Poles, then they work as partners to course correct.
So what’s the move?
It has looked bleak for the Bears the last several years — they haven’t had a winning season since 2018 — but there is some hope, especially on defense. There’s a lot of good on Poles’ ledger to balance out trading for Chase Claypool, trading away Roquan Smith and drafting Velus Jones in the third round.
His moves have been good enough that he deserves the chance to pick a quarterback. And he can pick Fields if he wants, but he’d better be right. No general manager could survive inheriting a first-round quarterback and getting the No. 1 overall draft pick two years in a row and failing to emerge with a franchise quarterback.
He’d have to be so sure of Fields that he’d bypass the No. 1 pick twice. And even with him showing some promise, it’d be hard to imagine he could be that certain. Fields is near the end of his third season, and this conversation wouldn’t be happening if he’d proven himself definitively by now.
Poles has such a strong bond with Eberflus that he probably has been looking for a reason to retain him, and the recent defensive uptick provides that.
The Bears should’ve gone with an offensive-minded head coach from the start — of the last 20 teams to reach a conference championship game, 17 had an offensive-minded head coach — and would be better off with one coming in to help them choose a quarterback in the draft, but if the defense closes out the last four games strongly, Poles can justify keeping Eberflus and merely changing offensive coordinators.
That’s where the Bears appear to be headed at the moment. But a lot can change in four games.
