Still Gotta Come Through Chicago

Voting for the Next Coach

Happy Friday Chicago!

You know what I miss? When a family member would scream at you from the TV room to “come see this,” and you had 3 seconds to sprint in your socks to go see it. You had to be careful with your “come see this” attempts, though. Nothing worse than a “that’s it?” from someone else after an across-house sprint.

For the first time in history, America’s younger generations are worse off than their predecessors. My dad bought a house young and could dunk. Not me.

The generational trauma is going to continue, too, because there’s just no shot that my son is going to have a better jumper than me. Plus, he’s not going to be able to supersede me financially if I keep up this hot streak on the DraftKings Sportsbook. The Crown is Yours (Ad).

You call the 1-800 gambling hotline late on a Thursday night, I call my accountant to see where we should invest (he’s my uncle).

I remember the first time I ever put a sports bet down. On the Detroit Pistons to win the Eastern Conference. This was not in the 1990s or 2000s.

If I put down $20 I can win $400? Sign me up.

The first time I hit a “game to go to overtime” bet I thought I had found my way to financial freedom.

It turns out I did not. But I’m still convinced I’m going to get there, albeit likely not through gambling. $35 to win $32, as it turns out, isn’t exactly carving out the key to class mobility.

But what could carve that key?

The best time to ask your friend hypotheticals on if they’d do X to get $Y is on a Sunday night. If you’re too afraid to ask your boys how they’re doing, how work is going, just ask them one of those hypotheticals as the sun goes down and Monday nears.

You’ll get the truth.

If things are really going poorly — girlfriend just left him, hates his boss, didn’t get the raise he wanted — you can fill in almost anything you want at X. As long as Y is enough that he could quit his job the next day.

The question I posed to my friend the other night wasn’t that exact sort of equation. I asked if he would take a 5-year, $25 million deal to coach the Bears.

There’s a lot to go over in this question. Your immediate thought is, “Of course!”

But I wouldn’t do it. That’s good money, yeah, but I know I am completely unqualified to coach the Bears. Not only would I further ruin an organization responsible for one of my favorite pastimes, but all of my friends (and a lot of my family) would end up hating me.

I’d end up with some money to sit on. But nothing would be the same after.

I know they’d be showing me picking my nose on the sideline as Troy Aikman ripped into me, and my little brother would be at home calling me a prick. The fallout wouldn’t be worth the money.

(I may take the job if it meant I could dunk.)

My friend took the bait though, and said he would. He said it was his dream. Dream? Are you still in kindergarten, buddy? You going to write that dream down for me in crayon in your notebook?

Then, the conversation shifted to whether he thinks he could run the Bears better than their current owners, the McCaskeys. Of course, he said. A confident chap, he is.

(These are the sort of discussions you have post-loss in Chicago, particular after the clocks change.)

He explained that he would simply delegate all of the tasks to other people. He must be a confident hirer and manager.

His first move? Hire Olin Kreutz to get things started! I like Olin Kreutz. He has also punched people at two of his previous places of employment. Tough start for the Master Delegator.

But after I laughed in his face — he’d be an awful owner — I started to consider something else, with election week ahead.

What if you could vote on the Chicago Bears head coach? Similar to the hypothetical above, that may strike you as a no-brainer good idea at the outset. Mull it over, and you may come to a different answer.

Let’s consider it. I’ll take you into a daydream that lasted nearly an hour and a half this week, as the U.S. considered who its next Commander-in-chief would be.

---

The year is 2042.

I walk into my son’s room to see if he left any dishes in there. Yes he did. He’s been bugging me these days. Not only does he leave his dishes around, he likes his mom more than me, he won’t keep his elbow in on his jumper, and he blames me for bad genetics because he can’t dunk.

“You think your genetics are bad because of that?” I asked him the other day, staring purposely at his hairline, already eroding toward the top of his scalp at age 15.

Then he says, “Well, Grandpa could dunk!”

Grandpa could dunk… how did he know that? We haven’t talked to Grandpa for 18 years, since he started the Eberflus Cause in 2024.

“How do you know that?” I asked, following him up the stairs. Check that — following him down the hallway (I didn’t make enough money for us to afford multiple floors).

Now I’m back in his room, picking up the dishes. I take a moment to look around — it’s dark, vaguely smelly, and there’s Bears memorabilia everywhere. The walls are painted Navy blue as a backdrop to the banners and posters. He’s not a fan of the Bulls, no one has watched them on television in 18 years. He likes the young star who exclusively shoots from half court, a guy that plays for the new team in Las Vegas. The window is open and it’s the middle of winter.

I sigh and pick up the dishes, almost tripping on something jutting out from under the bed. I pick up a binder, and letters fall out. Letters from Grandpa.

The “E” — which was synonymous with the Eberflus Cause of 2024, evoked from his personalized Lake Forest driveway — is plastered across each letter.

I start rifling through the correspondence between my son and my estranged father. They’re talking DVOA, Poles’ trade for Chase Claypool in 2022, the poor offensive lines of 2023 and 2024, all of the same talking points that drove our family apart nearly two decades ago.

“P.S. Can you dunk yet?”… Grandpa signs off each letter.

My son gets home, and I go to confront him with the letters.

He starts to cry. Amid the weeping, he shows it to his mother and I. He’s been going to see his Grandpa, he says, as he unveils a branded tattoo of the Eberflus “E” on his chest.

Life flashes before my eyes. I’m back in my childhood living room, watching the game with dad. The pizza is here and the Bears are forcing turnovers.

But then I snap out of it. If my son wants to be a man, I’ll let him me a man. I take him into the closet upstairs, and dust off an old computer. In a glass case is the blood-stained uniform I fought in — against the Eberflus cause — for the Vrabel Or Johnson “Change Coalition” back in 2024.

He’s enamored by the uniform. “Can I try it on, Dad?” Shut up, I reply.

The laptop begins shaking as I stick the hard drive in its side. I’m shaking too.

“Did Grandpa tell you about this?”

I show him the challenges. I show him the fourth-quarter collapses, the Jayden Daniels hail mary, the newspaper clips from the players condemning their own coach. I show him the press conferences.

“Why does Eberflus keep putting his hair back in place?” Shut up, I respond again.

“What about the 4-3 defensive scheme Grandpa talks about?” Shut up, for the last time.

Now, I show him the battles — on Lake Shore Drive, on Clark Street, on Michigan Avenue. The annexing of the Western and Northern suburbs. And the most gruesome of them all — the Battle of Soldier Field.

Brothers fought brothers in that fight, I told him. Fathers fought sons.

Now my eyes well up.

“I haven’t seen your grandfather since that battle.”

“Did you fight him, dad?”

I slam the closet door. That’s enough for the day.

My heart starts beating and my vision blurs. My wife brings me a cold towel to bring my temperature down, but it’s not my forehead that needs it. My chest is uncontrollably throbbing.

My wife removes my shirt and my son sees it for the first time — the V for Vrabel on my right peck, the J on my left peck for Johnson. OR DIE is hidden behind the untrimmed hairs on my stomach.

I look at my son, and he turns his head up at me.

“Your grandfather could dunk, your grandfather did make more money than me. But I did this for you. Do you understand? I fought for a better future, so you’d have a better life than we did.”

He thinks of the posters on the wall in his room.

“Would Eberflus have won those Super Bowls, Dad?”

I try to say no, I try to scream it! Nothing comes out. All of a sudden, there are childhood mementos in front of me. I smell my mother’s lemon chicken. Daisy, the family golden retriever, is at my leg.

The democratic vote for Bears coach ceased in 2024, the year after it started. The war that followed claimed 142,367 lives that year.

And in 2042, it claimed one more.

---

Let’s get into it.

---

I meant it when I wrote last week that the Washington loss was a back breaker, an inflection point. I thought that would ring true in January, though, and not just one week later.

The Bears looked like a poorly coached team on Sunday, but that’s nothing new. What was new was the general apathy — the evident quit in their play.

Quitting at 4-3?

Something is structurally wrong with this team. A win at home against the Patriots may mask that temporarily, but it won’t fix anything.

Eberflus needs to go, for reasons I’ve detailed throughout the last few newsletters. Think of his strengths. Think of his weaknesses. Is that a head coach? It’s not.

Before we move on.

Matt Eberflus, out of the half, on what he told his team in the locker room:

"I told them that 'Hey, this is what the score is and we have each other.'"

BOOM! When Eberflus is unemployed (God willing) next year, he could solve the cocaine crisis in this country by going around giving speeches in bar bathrooms. Who needs the white stuff when you’ve got each other?

We were told Eberflus’ strengths were that the guys like him and that he could run a defense. The guys clearly don’t like him (hold that thought), and the defensive dam broke on Sunday, as I expected it eventually would.

The defense finally breaking down is on his shoulders, no doubt. But to be frank, I don’t blame that side of the ball for eventually losing gusto. A third down stop, then an offensive three-and-out. Another third down stop. Then a special teams penalty. Another third-down-stop. Thirty seconds later, they’re back on the field.

Eventually, human nature is going to run its course.

So, I don’t blame Eberflus or his unit for eventually failing. It was bound to happen, even if giving up two touchdowns — two weeks in a row — to teams with 30 seconds on the clock before the end of the game or end of half, is patently ludicrous.

I do blame him for the overall operation. The team is incapable of getting off to a fast start. If there’s preparation going into the game script week in and week out, it’s not evident. If there’s a focus on reducing pre-snap penalties, it has fallen on deaf ears.

The Bears score 1.3 points per first quarter, good enough for 31st in the NFL. Nothing about this team screams, or even whispers, solid coaching.

Eberflus admitted he called a pass blitz on the play that led to a running touchdown just before the half. He overcorrected from the previous week on the field, and he overcorrected from a public relations perspective.

This is the first year with real expectations for ‘Flus, and it’s clear he can’t handle them. He deflected blame early last week, then recanted. He took the blame this week, and now keeps repeating “it’s on me,” like a child who just learned a curse word.

He didn’t deter Tyrique Stevenson from making a fool out of himself, then made a fool out of everyone by deciding to bench him for one quarter halfway into the week. Players thrive on direction, and the Bears coaching staff never has a clear one.

Either Stevenson is fit to play for the Chicago Bears or he’s not. Let’s not sit him in a knit cap for a quarter like he’s a college player who signed too many autographs for money in 2016.

My stance on Eberflus is clear, and the players have made it clear what they think of the coaching staff as well — publicly — throughout the season.

The Bears players have been whiny and overeager to vent to the media. That truth and the truth around Eberflus’ shortcomings are not mutually exclusive.

I would have landed on my Eberflus opinion without the players’ help. They helped solidify the case, but they didn’t need to.

Guys that I thought were leaders — Marcedes Lewis, D.J. Moore, Kevin Byard — they just can’t get out of their own way. This isn’t a “shut up and play football” stance.

Instead, it’s a genuine question: What good comes out of making your coaches look like ass holes in the middle of a competitive season?

The accountability starts at the top, with the coaches. But the players need to be held accountable, too, and they need to hold themselves to a higher standard. Do they think trashing the operation, like I am in my blog, is going to help them personally in the long run?

I sure hope it does, because they’ve opened that door.

The Bears will win more games this year. I’ll live and die over every one one of them. But now, with that door open, the chaos can’t be swept back inside. If you have an example of a team that had this much hoopla surrounding each loss, and then turned it around to do great things, I’d love to hear about them.

All the while, the diva, painted nails, So-Cal quarterback goes to the lectern each week and takes responsibility and his beatings.

I don’t know if D.J. Moore is the subject of bad visuals that can be explained logically, or if he has turned the corner behaviorally. I do know that it’s his job to try and make sure that there aren’t any bad visuals this week, or next week, whether he can help it or not.

The Bears let the “one play, one game” — Eberflus’ words — turn into a lot more than that, immediately. That’s a Paper-Tiger Team. How disappointing.

The defense had not allowed more than 21 points in game dating back to November of last year. That streak ended Sunday, and the Bears have now allowed 481 yards of offense and 350 yards of offense over the last two weeks.

Injuries certainly haven’t helped.

And, as of Thursday, Jaquan Brisker and Darnell Wright are still not practicing. A slew of other Bears have been upgraded, however, including help in the trenches: Montez Sweat, Ryan Bates, and Teven Jenkins all practiced in full on Thursday. Braxton Jones practiced after sitting out Wednesday.

The Bears needed to win one of the last two for us fans to have some semblance of confidence moving into division play. They didn’t do so, though.

Sunday’s game is against a tanking team, and the Bears sit at .500. There’s “must-win” so we can keep our wildest dreams alive, and there’s “must-win” so we can continue to look forward to football for the rest of the year.

This week’s contest is the latter version of a must-win.

I ain’t too proud to beg.

Hopefully a miracle occurred in Halas Hall this week, and hopefully it diverted the Bears off the path they were heading toward. If not, we’ll be screaming into the abyss for the 6th straight year. We’ll be waiting — again — for the offseason, which is filled with hopeful delusions rather than the reality checks served to us in the fall.

#BEARDOWN

---

Thank you sincerely for reading another edition of the newsletter. If you enjoyed it, please send it to some of your friends and family. Comment below.