Taylor Swift, welcome to your Eberflus Era.
And yes, it always looks like this.
Swift might have gotten inspiration for new sad-girl music by watching the Chicago Bears get thoroughly rolled 41-10 by the Kansas City Chiefs at Arrowhead Stadium.
Or perhaps the Bears could just borrow her song “Anti-Hero” for a more realistic team song. The lyrics, “Hi, it’s me, I’m the problem,” seem to fit this franchise better than any talk about thrilling the nation with its T-formation.
Now and seemingly forever, the entire organization is the problem, starting with ineffectual ownership and ending with the players on the field, who seem overmatched by any NFL team, let alone the defending Super Bowl champions.
GM Ryan Poles visited the Bears interview room this week to put a public face on the turmoil surrounding the organization, as an 0-2 team with perennial quarterback problems having to deal with an issue that is unique to even them: a mysterious absence and resignation from their defensive coordinator Alan Williams, with rumors flying like the familiar epithets in Chicago-area living rooms as Bears fans watch another season go down the drain.
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“To make it really, really clear, I know the outside noise, but no one in our building is panicking,” Poles said. “No one is flinching at any situations, not our owner, not our president, our head coach, not myself, none of our players. Everyone is focusing on solving the issues that we have so that we can be a better football team.”
Imagine what an unfocused team would look like. This past week was such a disaster for the Bears the joke was that the actual Chiefs game might just be their saving grace. Well, that was way off.
The Bears trailed 34-0 at the half, the result of a thorough domination at every position on the field, including, obviously, the coaching staffs. Fired Bears coach Matt Nagy, now back in his old stomping grounds in Kansas City, had the Chiefs offense looking like the Bears in the first two weeks, but all it took was one game against Matt Eberflus’ HITS principle defense and the Chiefs looked like the Chiefs again.
No wonder Travis Kelce invited Swift to this particular game. She’s had much more success at Soldier Field lately than the Bears. People might make fun of her dancing, but she’s way more fluid than the Chicago offense, starting with Justin Fields.
In his oft-sleepy Wednesday press conference, Fields made waves by suggesting that the coaching he’s receiving has helped lead to him playing “robotic” and that he would go back to playing like he did last season when he put up the second-best rushing season by a quarterback in league history.
“My goal this week is just to say ‘F it’ and go out there and play football how I know to play football,” he said. “That includes thinking less and just going out there and playing off of instincts rather than so much say info in my head, data in my head. Just literally going out there and playing football. Going back to it’s a game and that’s it. That’s when I play my best, when I’m just out there playing free and being myself, so I’m going to say kind of bump all the what I should, this and that, pocket stuff. I’m going to go out there and be me.”
Instead, “F it” was what Bears fans were saying as they changed the channel.
GO DEEPER
Mahomes pulled early in Chiefs' rout of Bears
With a shaky, injury-riddled offensive line and receivers dropping passes, it wasn’t all on Fields. But it’s not like he looked loose and comfortable out there either. In the first half, he went 4-for-10 for 40 yards and an interception. He had a 17-yard carry, but it wasn’t a designed run.
The idea that the Bears were going to somehow find inspiration from a trying week in the public eye was so ridiculous that I don’t think anyone believed it, inside or outside of Halas Hall. We know this is a bad football team. The Bears can’t hide it.
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While there weren’t many preseason playoff predictions, there was noticeable optimism after a 3-14 season. Poles traded the No. 1 pick for more picks and No. 1 receiver DJ Moore. He hit the free-agent market to remake the defense. But the results so far have made dreams of an 8-9 record look as laughable as those Fields MVP futures.
There’s so much wrong with this team, it’s hard to know where to start. But beyond George McCaskey, the hapless owner, and Poles, the possibly overmatched GM, there’s Eberflus, who is doubling as the defensive coordinator with Williams gone. In each of their three losses, the Bears have looked unprepared and undisciplined. You can’t come to town preaching about your acronym-laden personal philosophy and put out a team that looks Trestman-esque every week.
Where is this all going? I think we all know.
The GM-coach-QB triumvirate will continue to be shuffled completely out of rhythm. They’ll draft a new quarterback, fire the head coach, pink slip the GM, but they’ll do it in the wrong order, of course.
New team president Kevin Warren talks a big game, but who knows if he has what it takes to fix an organization as damaged as this one. He might’ve gotten USC and UCLA into the Midwest’s premier football conference, but perhaps it’s too much to ask to make the NFL’s charter franchise into a competent modern one.
It’s going to be a long season. Some would say a cruel fall.
Meanwhile, Bears fans, ones used to dysfunction and losing, are looking at this team, thinking they didn’t think it would get this bad, this soon. No, not even in their wildest dreams.
(Top photo of Justin Fields scrambling against the Chiefs: Cooper Neill / Getty Images)
