The team lets the coach do a press conference, then cans him hours later.
I don’t know what kind of business the McCaskeys are running, but it’s not an NFL franchise.
A legitimate pro football team doesn’t allow its sad-sack head coach to do a press conference the morning after an appalling loss and then fire him hours later. That’s what the Bears did to Matt Eberflus on Friday. But don’t mistake ineptitude for coldness. This wasn’t cruelty. This was typical Halas Hall denseness.
A legitimate pro football team doesn’t bring back the likes of Eberflus for one more season after he’s compiled a two-year record of 10-24. That’s what the Bears did after last season, and the original sin of Eberflus’ retention led to all the spectacular sins of this season. It led to the biggest sin of all, Eberflus’ decision not to call a timeout Thursday as the clock ticked torturously down with the Bears needing one decent completion to have a chance to tie the game against the mighty Lions.
That egregious mistake apparently was enough to get team chairman George McCaskey off his memory foamed existence and into something resembling action. Or maybe it was Eberflus’ continued insistence that the Bears’ plan late in the Detroit game was a sound one. Maybe that bizarreness finally brought McCaskey to some semblance of consciousness.
In a rare moment of lucidity, the family did something the Bears have never done in their 104-year history: They fired their head coach during the season. Trust me, there were more than a few Bears coaches who deserved to be fired midseason, but due to some strange organizational allegiance to courtesy, decorum or economics, the Bears have always said no to making a change.
