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The Chicago Bears are, unsurprisingly, a mess. They finally fired their Head Coach, Matt Eberflus, a move that should’ve been made last year, after another disastrous case of poor game management on Thanksgiving Day against the Lions.
The franchise, which seemingly hasn’t had direction for decades now, completely botched the firing of Matt Eberflus. Bears president Kevin Warren admitted that much on Monday.
Matt Eberflus embarrassed the whole franchise with this fiasco at the end of of their Thanksgiving Day 23-20 loss to the Lions with one of the biggest TV audiences of the year.
"I can't believe they didn't take a timeout!"
Lions win in a CRAZY finish over the Bears 😮 pic.twitter.com/iLqZLMKpDh
— NFL on CBS 🏈 (@NFLonCBS) November 28, 2024
At 4-8 and losers of six straight, Eberflus’s tenure was clearly over. They fired him last Friday, but not until after they made him do the postgame press conference. It was far too late, anyways. They should’ve fired him after last season after a 7-10 year which made his overall record 10-24 in Chicago.
On Monday, Kevin Warren expressed regret for how it all went down. Here’s Pro Football Talk with more.
Meeting with reporters on Friday, Bears CEO Kevin Warren acknowledged that firing Matt Eberflus after Eberflus conducted a day-after-game press conference during which he expressed confidence that he’d remain on the job wasn’t ideal.
“In retrospect could we have done it better?” Warren said, via David Haugh of 670 The Score. “Yes. But we were trying to be respectful.”
The concern was that delaying the Friday morning press conference would have ignited a brush fire of speculation, with aggressive efforts by reporters to figure out what was going on. The Bears preferred to have time to decide whether to make the change, without causing chaos.
They still could have postponed it. Or they could have expedited the decision-making process, treating the start of the press conference as the deadline for figuring out what to do.
Mike Florio sums it up well. The Bears once again botched an easy situation like only the Bears can.