Who should stay and who should go from Bears? Does it really matter?
Selfishly I root for Justin Fields to remain a Bear, Matt Eberflus, too, though I have no opinion on Luke Getsy, nor would I recognize him at the DMV. All three may depart soon, leaving fillable holes and little regret.
The Bears are, after all, the Bears where coaches come and go, quarterbacks flounder and seasons sink into the muck of memory, inseparable one from the other, used tires rotated on a broken bus.
Of the three, Getsy appears most likely to take the fall for another failed Bears season since, as coordinator of a patchy offense, he has failed to polish the gem that is Fields, if lately cheered by success against woeful foes.
Usually coaches of Getsy’s job description labor without much public review, the good ones concealed within their own fraternity and the bad ones passed along among friends. But the light that shone on Fields has been too bright, and too erratic, to not raise the question, “Why isn’t he better?” And “Who is to blame?”
Somehow those questions are supposed to be answered in the final game of the year, the second showdown against Green Bay, a team with its own young quarterback questions, although the answers on Jordan Love seem more settled than those still lurking around Fields.
Not to forget, Love replaced possibly the second greatest Green Bay quarterback ever, while Fields followed a sad list of duds stretched like so many headstones behind him. Who had the tougher job?
If Fields — and by extension, Getsy — were to somehow reclaim the authority and dignity the Bears lost to Brett Favre and then Aaron Rodgers over these last decades, well, the scales may tip back to amnesty and both of them stay put.
And this would go for Eberflus, too, who is sort of the lost figurehead among the endangered trio. It may need to take a big win for the other two to remain Bears, but any win would likely do it for Eberflus.
Deciding all of this will be Ryan Poles and Kevin Warren, the Hans and Franz of the Bears and current gatekeepers of whatever happens next, each with his own patch to protect. Here is how those jobs usually break down; the team president makes sure the owner has ice and the general manager picks the players.
Great coaches, even moderately successful ones, are free of front office meddling. They take the credit and make plans. None of this has been true of the Bears since Mike Ditka, and while the Bears have never fired a coach during the season the job comes with a leash made shorter by ineptness.
Eberflus may be a good coach. Hard to know. Dynamic he is not. Imaginative he is not. Obedient he is. Compliant and diligent and careful he seems to be. Does this make him Bill Belichick or even Ron Rivera (two good coaches soon to be available), it does not.
His record is what it is, and it is awful (10-23 with a 14-game losing streak) and like Matt Nagy before him he will likely find a responsible job somewhere else. I say keep him on.
This brings us to Fields, and doesn’t that always seem to be the case? Selfishly, which is where we started, I find Fields a continuing and fascinating conversation piece, the imperfect specimen we know rather than any newly drafted mystery guest we will have to sort out.
His moments of brilliance have amounted only to teases of what might be, and whether that is as a winner or as a showoff, he is always just a column away. So, I say keep Fields but get a more reliable stand-in than the kid from West Virginia.
There they are, on the last game of the season, the uncertain trio, bound together by doubt and insecurity, probably deserving better but getting whatever comes.
It ought not to come down to this, to one game, to judge the whole of where the Bears have been, where they are and where they are headed. Winning in Green Bay will no more erase stumbling early than projecting success ahead.
Very Bears, that.