Still Gotta Come Through Chicago

Fire Matt Nagy Pt. 3; Tony La Whoops My Car Just Hit the Curb

Good morning Chicagoans! Thanks for reading last week’s newsletter, and every newsletter — much gratitude, as always.

I see some of you are starting to drag the newsletter out of your promotions tab on Gmail and into your primary inbox. Please keep doing that and alerting others to do the same.

And get someone to subscribe today. I’ve teased this for a while, but good things will be coming for those of you who show out for SGCTC.

We’ve got a lot to get to today: The Sox just hired a manager who mere months ago crashed his 76-year-old body along with his car into a curb while drunk and the Bears have a coach whose game plan is basically that in a metaphorical sense.

To think that the most exciting Chicago sports angle in my life right now is the NBA season starting much earlier than expected (Dec. 22) and the Bulls having, like, a just competent organizational structure, is pretty depressing.

But alas, here we are. Let’s get to it, the third newsletter in a row calling for the firing of Matt Nagy after the most disgusting game these eyes have ever seen and a breakdown of Tony La Russa and his second — you read that right — DUI.

Next week, we’ll get to chat Bulls with the NBA Draft coming up quickly and free agency opening shortly thereafter.

Let’s go.

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Bear Down, Down, Down, Down

Would you rather have to watch The Masked Singer from start to finish from now until the show gets cancelled or re-watch that game just once more?

My brother is on a road trip down to Florida and stopped in Nashville for the night. His question to me on Saturday: Is it worth it to pay a hefty price for Bears/Titans tickets Sunday? My answer: Yes.

How in God’s name am I ever going to pay him back for that? I subjected someone I love to the most brutal three-hour event anyone witnessed on Sunday nationwide. It’s not about the money. It’s about the psychological abuse.

Can you imagine paying hundreds of dollars to watch that game, coupled with hillbillies screaming on every disgusting third and out, in between them screaming at public health officials because they were asked to put their masks back on?

I don’t know if he’ll ever recover, and thus, I don’t know if I’ll recover. I am forever indebted to him for telling him — with all the previous weeks’ evidence — to go ahead and pull the trigger on those tickets.

Matt Nagy, oh Matt Nagy. He’s clearly starting to think about the optics. He doesn’t want to get fired, so instead of going for it, down 17, on the 4-yard line, in the fourth quarter, he decides to get rid of the goose egg and kick a field goal.

That alone is a fireable offense.

But he clearly doesn’t think about optics enough to abstain from trotting out Cordarrelle Patterson on fourth downs and running fake pitches with one yard to go.

He actually said in his press conference that he wasn’t sure what went wrong on that play. He writes this newsletter for me: ‘It’s a dive, that’s youth football stuff,’ he said.

Correct Matt, that is youth football stuff.

In the NFL over the last decade, teams have converted on fourth and short situations about 65% of the time. The Bears, under Matt Nagy, have converted fourth downs at at a rate far lower than that on fourth down over the last two years.

Instead of maybe just a quarterback sneak on 4th and 1, we elect to put two men in the backfield with their goddamn hands on the ground like it’s peewee football, and fake a pitch before handing it off. I would say Matt Nagy is the only one in the country who thought that play would work, but to his credit, I don’t believe he’s actually dumb enough to think that was going to work. There’s just got to be something else to it.

It’s worse when you consider why they were going for it on 4th and 1 in the first place. If you remember, Allen Robinson caught a ball on third down where he pretty clearly got the first down. If you were a capable coach, you may think, ‘Hey, not only are first downs a good thing, but based on our 4th down conversion rate while I’ve been coaching, we should probably not try our luck on a 4th and 1 if we don’t have to.’

Nope. The brilliance of Matt Nagy strikes again. And his brilliance — instead of what we thought it might be in 2018 — is consistently, without fail, making the move that embarrasses the city of Chicago as much as humanly possible.

The Bears were also 2-15 on third downs Sunday. They have the second worst conversion rate on third down in the league, just ahead of the New York Jets. As you may have noticed, there’s a theme here. The Bears are basically attached at the hip offensively to a team that is very likely going to go 0-16, and a team that is likely happy about that.

But it gets worse. This isn’t an anomaly. The Bears have converted third downs just above 32% this year. Last year, they did so 35% of the time, which put them above only a handful of teams. These aren’t new problems. They’re deep-rooted, organizational ones.

Last week, Matt Nagy basically said — and I’m paraphrasing here — after an internal review conducted by me, I have decided that I, in fact, am not the problem. And thus he kept the play calling duties and made us watch an offense that didn’t reach the red zone until the fourth quarter, when he eventually kicked a field goal from the four like the absolute coward that he is.

The Bears offense is fourth to last in yards per game and points per game. Take out garbage time and I’m sure they’d be worse in both categories.

Worse yet, the team that just made them look like an FCS school on Sunday? Yeah, they’re a bottom-5 pass defense. In the previous three games the Titans played, they allowed 31, 27 and 36 points. The Bears scored… we’re not really going to call that 17, are we? The Bears scored basically nothing until the game was far out of reach.

The saddest thing about it, too, is that the defense played fantastic again. In the first five drives of the game, the Titans offense combined for -17 yards and gained 3 yards or less on 80% of their plays.

Kyle Fuller, Khalil Mack, and Roquan Smith are all having incredible years, and it’s all for naught.

(According to Next Gen Stats, Fuller is the fourth best outside corner this year based on completion percentage over expectation allowed, at -7%. Khalil Mack is third overall on “sacks created,” an advanced metric created by ESPN. Roquan Smith is second in all of football in tackles, according to PFF.)

The Titans played pretty horribly. They could get nothing going on offense and their best player, Derrick Henry, could barely get past the line of scrimmage for a large portion of the game. It was a winnable game from start to finish and yet at no point did I believe the Bears were going to win.

It’s not an exaggeration to say the Bears are probably one of the worst teams in the league right now. Sure, they’re 5-4, but their offense would suggest they were tanking for Trevor Lawrence and they’re underdogs — at home — against the 3-5 Vikings this week.

The offense hasn’t changed at all, by the way. Has there been any break from the same old bullshit, that you’ve noticed? I can’t find a single one. The same, lame play calls. Matt Nagy might as well wave a white flag on third down. Before the half, Nagy looked like he was happy to get out of there just down 10-0. Their longest rush of the game came from a defensive player on a fake punt.

Once again, you just cannot make up this level of embarrassment.

Our offensive line is atrocious. We’ve known that, and we’ll get to that more later. But why not try something different? Why not substitute a run game with short, over-the-middle passes? Instead we run a backwards ground game and impossible-to-complete pass plays for our immobile quarterback.

Good coaches adjust to what they have. Bad coaches keep throwing the same shit at the wall and expect a different result.

This bears repeating as well, because beating a dead horse feels appropriate right now: Matt Nagy’s usage of timeouts is so bad I actually get excited to see when he’ll use them. His incompetence has become entertaining to me, really.

Whenever you think the Bears could use a timeout, without fail, you’ll find one timeout or less down on the ticker below.

The Bears converted on that fake punt, and then they call a timeout!

‘Jesus fellas, we just gained like 11 yards, we’ve got to regroup here.’

He gave up before the half. He gives up on third downs. And two out of the last three weeks, he’s wasted precious time in the fourth quarter like the Bears were up two scores and not vice versa.

Being a bad team is one thing. Having a bad coach is another. But having a bad team that has a coach that gives up is total bullshit. Do we not deserve more as fans? There’s a litany of reasons Matt Nagy should be fired, but his simultaneous arrogance and cowardice is by far the mix that infuriates me the most.

Let’s revisit another theme. Our punt returner, Dwayne Harris, has been delightful. That’s mostly because he just catches the ball, and sometimes, even advances it forward!

The fact that Nagy allowed Ted Ginn Jr. — now cut — to actively worsen our chances of winning on every punt for multiple weeks in a row, is an abomination. In other words, why did a simple fix take so goddamn long?

The Bears are also the most penalized team in the NFL, and they commit them in hilarious fashion.

I mean seriously, if you wanted to create a resume for a coach, with the sole goal being to get fired, what would you do differently than Matt Nagy?

And Ryan Pace isn’t off the hook. The Bears went into the offseason with two glaring issues — the quarterback and the offensive line.

Now, I think blaming Foles for our issues is silly. The idea that an immobile quarterback could be successful with an inept play caller and an offensive line that gives him approximately .8 seconds to throw is ludicrous.

But what exactly did we do to bolster the offensive line? We drafted a few late-rounders and instead signed two more tight ends, a washed up wide receiver, a defensive end for tens of millions of dollars who has barely gotten his jersey dirty, and brought in new coaches that have no say in changing things from the way they are.

The priorities astound me. It turns out that hiring a new offensive line coach doesn’t do shit when none of your starters can move the men in front of them backwards or contain them from running right past them.

Still, Pace’s biggest sin is hiring Nagy, which has become clear. Yes, that includes drafting Mitch Trubisky. The Jets and the Patriots played Monday night. The Patriots have maybe the worst roster in the league this year and their offense still runs circles around Nagy’s.

The Jets scored on a 50-yard touchdown, something the Bears have done once — ONCE — in Matt Nagy’s entire head coaching career. Joe Flacco was running a smooth offense for the now 0-9 Jets. Again, if you think the blame lies anywhere but Nagy, you’re not paying attention.

The worst part about putting this newsletter together every week is having to watch his press conferences. At no point does he take any real blame for the struggles the Bears are having, nor does he say anything that would inspire confidence or make me think that he is worth having a head coaching job.

The closest he got was this week, on the offensive woes: “That starts with me and we’ve got to get better.”

It starts with you, Matt, but please don’t let it end with you. If all you care about is winning, please give the play calling up. But that would take real leadership, so it won’t happen.

Then he blames the players, as he’s wont to do. It was about the penalties, which are drive killers, our fearless leader said.

Not a single drive early on was seriously impacted by penalties. Again, it’s a larger issue, but players’ individual penalties are not the problem.

He went on to say, “We’ve got to be more effective in the red zone, too.” Bro, you didn’t get there until the fourth quarter! You could have been flawless in the red zone and still would have lost the game.

I hope I’m not breaking this news to you, because I just found it out as well, somehow. The Bears … this is hard. I didn’t think I was going to cry doing this. Can you give me a moment?

The Bears…. the Bears are in primetime this week against the Vikings on Monday night. The only thing that makes these Bears performances worse is having to watch them alongside the entire nation. It ruins my entire week.

Maybe Brian Griese will tell us something else denigrating that Nick Foles said about Nagy. I recommend you start drinking early for this one. The Bears, in front of an empty stadium, will be home dogs against a team that has had Trevor Lawrence hopes until basically last week.

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Tony La Whoopsies My Car Just Hit the Curb

Just when you thought the great city of Chicago couldn’t possibly be embarrassed more by one of its acting coaches.

On Monday, ESPN reported that Tony La Russa was charged with a DUI after ramming his car into a curb in February, leaving it smoking on the side of the road in Phoenix.

We all believe in second chances though, yeah? Ah, well La Russa also fell asleep at a stop sign while in his vehicle in 2007, which also led to a DUI.

When ESPN reached him by phone for this story, La Russa said, "I have nothing to say," and proceeded to hang up on the reporter.

According the report, after La Russa was taken into custody, he was described as being “argumentative.” Remember that this is the same man who said he was offended by the act of kneeling for the flag because of his incredible respect for military men and women and police officers.

If so, it begs the question why he would be an ass hole to someone who reported to a scene where he wreaked of alcohol next to a car crashed into a curb.

But, that’s neither here nor there.

The White Sox not only went out on a limb to hire a 76-year-old man who has been out of the league for nearly a decade, but also hired a man who had just been charged with a DUI — one that they knew about.

“Do you have any recent criminal history?”

“Yes, actually.”

“Okay, fantastic. What are your thoughts on lefty/righty match ups?”

These aren’t just traffic stop DUIs either. This man has fallen asleep while drunk at the wheel and also crashed his car into a curb. If you’ve gotten this severe of DUIs, I imagine that means that you’ve driven around violently drunk on, conservatively, hundreds of occasions.

Now, as you know from by previous newsletters, I was not a fan of the Sox pursuing A.J. Hinch or Alex Cora due to their roles in the Astros’ cheating scandals.

But the idea that Jerry Reinsdorf couldn’t get past a cheating scandal but was okay with a man putting others in grave danger by driving recklessly while drunk is some seriously deranged shit.

This is an absolute mess for the White Sox. “Members” of the Sox organization were already reportedly upset with the hiring, and now they’ll have to come to grips with the fact that they hired a man who had just been charged with his second DUI.

Talk about privilege. In what other job are you able to have an ongoing investigation for a DUI on top of another one and still be hired?

Poor Rick Hahn. Now he’ll get trotted out to answer questions about a guy’s mistakes who he didn’t even want to hire in the first place.

Hahn is a great GM, and he’s done an incredible job to get the White Sox out of the basement of the MLB. His reward? Answering questions about a 76-year-old with drinking problems who he didn’t want to hire as manager in the first place.

Jerry, you did it again!

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See you all next week.