Sunday was a good day for the Bears fans out there rooting for Caleb Williams to succeed while simultaneously hoping for the team to lose to get a better draft slot and to fire head coach Matt Eberflus.
Williams indeed looked good, throwing for 340 yards and 2 touchdowns while completing 68% of his passes and finishing with a 103.1 passer rating. And once again, he avoided turning the ball over and led yet another fourth-quarter comeback, bringing the Bears back from a 14-point deficit early in the final period and sending the game into overtime.
For those of us who enjoy rooting for the Bears on a weekly basis, what we saw was another disappointing loss, 30-27, this one mostly at the hands of the defense, who got gashed by journeyman Sam Darnold.
The Vikings quarterback threw for 330 yards and 2 touchdowns, completing 65.7% of his passes and finishing with a 116.1 passer rating.
The Bears’ porous run defense got bludgeoned by long-time nemesis, Aaron Jones, to the tune of 106 yards on 22 attempts.
And while Jaylon Johnson and the defense did a masterful job of holding Justin Jefferson in check, Jordan Addison and T.J. Hockenson made the Bears pay. Addison had 8 catches for 162 yards and a touchdown while Hockenson had 7 catches for 114 yards.
Simply put, this Bears defense, once proclaimed to be a Top 5 unit at best, and a Top 10 one at worst, has now looked like a bottom third defense during this miserable 5-game losing streak.
Which means that even after Thomas Brown took over the offense and even if they average 23 points per game the rest of the season, I’m not so sure they will win more games than they lose with the way the defense has been playing.
Don’t confuse my calling out the defense with me letting the other two units off the hook. The offense took forever to get going on Sunday. They had just 10 points early in the fourth quarter. And let’s not forget the mistakes of the special teams, who allowed yet another blocked field goal and gave up premium field position when DeAndre Carter let a poison punt deflect off his leg, which the Vikings recovered.
The whole operation was bad, or at least not good enough to win. And that’s now five weeks in a row. This is just not acceptable for a regime in its third year after a lengthy rebuild and with pieces that should be playing better.
If you’re truly one of those fans hoping and praying that Matt Eberflus makes history as the first Bears head coach to be fired in the middle of a season, you must be licking your chops about what’s coming on Thursday — and no, I’m not talking about the Thanksgiving turkey.
The Bears will make a trip to Detroit to face who I consider the best overall team in the NFL, the division rival, 10-1 Lions. This game, unless the Bears prove me wrong — and I hope they do — has ass-kicking written all over it. This has national embarrassment written all over it. And if the Bears do, indeed, get pantsed on Thanksgiving Day, that 10-day window before their next game looks mighty wide open for a coaching change if Ryan Poles, Kevin Warren and George McCaskey decide to pull the trigger.
I still expect Eberflus to coach the remainder of the season. I also don’t think that Brown is a viable head coaching candidate, although he’s on the right side of the ball for my preference. But if the Bears are seriously considering Brown as a potential replacement for Eberflus, then I would say it does, in fact, makes sense to cut ties with Eberflus on Black Friday.
And that’s not coming from a place of anger and vengeance like so many other Bears fans are exhibiting out there, but from a state of rational thought. Why not give Brown a 5-week interim trial to see how the team responds to him?
I’m already preparing myself mentally for a Bears embarrassment on Thursday. Mostly because I don’t want a terrible loss to ruin my holiday. I have a lot to be thankful for this year, as always. A winning football team, unfortunately, is not one of them.
Maybe next year we’ll be toasting to success on Thanksgiving Day.