CHICAGO — Fans booed and chanted to fire the head coach. They headed for the exits in droves.
The locker room had an all-too-familiar silence to it. The players who spoke were stunned and lacked answers to the obvious.
How did the Chicago Bears get here?
“Can’t put it into words,” wide receiver DJ Moore said. “Difficult loss. Go back to the drawing boards and just be real with ourselves.”
No one in the locker room will play the blame game, but to lose 19-3 at home to the New England Patriots is an institutional failure. Every decision that led to this point deserves scrutiny, whether it was something as micro as quarterback Caleb Williams throwing a swing pass to Moore instead of handing it off or something as franchise-altering as the front office deciding to keep head coach Matt Eberflus.
That’s how bad a loss in this situation was. As Eberflus said when asked about the offensive coordinator position, “Everything is going to be looked at.”
“It was pretty bad,” tight end Cole Kmet said. “We’ve got a lot that we’ve got to get corrected.”
Only 14 days ago, the 4-2 Bears played a flexed late-afternoon game against the Washington Commanders. Everything seemed to be going in the right direction coming off a three-game winning streak and a bye to fix what wasn’t working: the first-quarter offense and run defense.
Now the Bears are 4-5. They’ve been shut out in the first quarter in five consecutive games. They had one of their worst offensive performances in years against a 2-7 Patriots team that ranked 26th in yards per play allowed, 27th in yards per pass allowed, 28th in sacks per pass and 27th on third down.
The Bears responded by putting up 142 yards of offense and 4.0 yards per pass. They allowed nine sacks for the seventh time in franchise history and went 1-for-14 on third down.
If that juxtaposition sounds familiar, it was a similar refrain last week after a 29-9 drubbing at the Arizona Cardinals.
When given an opportunity to respond to losing in an unimaginable fashion against the Commanders, the Bears were beaten in all three phases by the Cardinals. When given an opportunity to bounce back and get a needed win before division play against a last-place team, they couldn’t move the football.
One of the themes after the game from Eberflus and Williams was that the Bears have the players. If you go up and down the roster, they do. The offensive line was in tatters Sunday and even when healthy has struggled, but this is one of the better Bears rosters in the post-Lovie Smith era.
Williams accepted the blame for his role in the losing. He has completed 50.5 percent of his passes in the past three games. His accuracy has been off. He’s not getting the ball out quickly enough. A lot of that is to be expected, though, from a rookie, even one as heralded as Williams.
If the Bears have the quarterback and the players around him, how did the organization screw this up?
• Offensive coordinator Shane Waldron simply has not put the offense in a position to succeed. Running back D’Andre Swift had his moments Sunday, but then we’d see the run abandoned. Too much was put on a banged-up offensive line and, therefore, Williams. The rookie quarterback acknowledged his errors on third down, but like the past two weeks, this scheme isn’t giving him layups. We saw Patriots quarterback Drake Maye get some nice, easy chunk plays to open receivers. That didn’t happen for Williams, and he has better receivers.
• On Feb. 22, Eberflus stood at the lectern at Halas Hall to introduce Waldron. He lauded the team’s two-week process that landed its coordinators. He thanked his bosses for the resources that allowed him to travel the West Coast and interview play callers. The stakes were high with the No. 1 pick and the fact that Eberflus’ first choice as offensive coordinator, Luke Getsy, didn’t work. He chose Waldron. He chose to promote Chris Morgan to run game coordinator and pair him with Waldron. However the Bears got to Waldron, and however they built this offensive staff, is rightly under heavy criticism.
For the second week in a row, Eberflus took full accountability after the game, saying, “I’ll take responsibility for it.”
“The whole thing,” he said. “The operation of it: offense, defense, kicking. That’s the job of the head coach. So, to me, that’s accountability for everything.”
Eberflus knows that everything that goes on reflects on him, but the coordinator decision goes above him too, as does blame for Sunday’s dismal performance. The Bears put themselves in this position. Their performance on offense means a serious examination of everything that led to it.
• General manager Ryan Poles and his staff built a roster that looks nothing like the one he inherited in 2022, but a three-game losing streak that has put heat on the coaching staff raises the ultimate question: Should Eberflus have been retained after last season? Though Poles improved the offensive line depth, as he sees how many times Williams has been sacked, should more have been done to fortify the starters?
• This goes above Poles, too, to president/CEO Kevin Warren, who had an opportunity in his first offseason to make a major change to help the infrastructure that would get its best chance to right the quarterback ship. Warren, whose downtown stadium plans are stalled while the team sits on land in Arlington Heights, could still be the wild card that would allow this iteration of the Bears to make in-season moves.
• And then it goes to chairman George McCaskey, whose hiring committee identified Poles and Eberflus nearly three years ago. Under McCaskey’s tenure, the Bears have won zero playoff games, are on their fifth head coach and third GM and could be moving on to their 10th offensive coordinator.
With Williams, Moore, Swift, Kmet, Keenan Allen and Rome Odunze on offense, the Bears scored 3 points against the Patriots at Soldier Field.
For the offense to combust in such spectacular fashion after back-to-back weeks of chatter about team meetings and accountability, that’s the type of loss that falls on everyone in the organization.
Sunday was supposed to be a return to .500, an opportunity to take advantage of a rebuilding Patriots team before the Green Bay Packers come to town. Instead, it was one of the Bears’ worst losses in years.
And that’s saying something.
(Top photo of Caleb Williams getting sacked by Jahlani Tavai: Michael Reaves / Getty Images)
