Chicago Bears 2022 season in review: Grading the coaches

Head coach — Matt Eberflus

While many people expected Poles to hire an offensive-minded coach to help develop quarterback Justin Fields, Poles went against the grain. He saw how having an offensive-minded coach in Nagy failed miserably. Despite being a so-called “quarterback whisperer” Nagy failed to do anything with two young quarterbacks — Mitchell Trubisky and Fields.

Poles went and hired former Indianapolis defensive coordinator Matt Eberflus to take over the Bears.

Looking at it at face value, many people criticized the move. The Bears needed to jump-start the offense and a coach with experience running an offense was needed.

Well, hiring Eberflus actually was a good idea. As we saw with Nagy, the offensive guru likely feels that his system is the end-all, be-all. Nagy was stubborn with how he ran his offense. He wanted to have the players adjust to his system instead of adjusting his system to his players. That was a royal mess.

With Eberflus, he was more open to a collaborative effort. He wasn’t the expert in the room concerning the offense. He had his ideas of what he wanted to be done but was open to having his coordinators’ ideas used.

What Eberflus did this season was keep the players involved in each game despite the mounting losses. Opposing teams found that they’d be in a dogfight despite having a lot more talent than Chicago.

Despite losing their final 10 games and finishing 3-14 for the season, the Bears played hard in nearly every game. While most people looked at the final score and determined that the Bears and their coaches just sucked, upon closer look you’d see that a bounce here or there and the season could have gone completely differently.

Ten times the Chicago Bears were in the fourth quarter in a one-score game. They won just two of them. The fact that the team, without much talent, competed in so many games is a testament to Eberflus’ influence.

Eberflus introduced his HITS principle. The first part of his principle is playing hard and with intensity. That is how the Bears played. They nearly always played hard and with intensity.

The other parts were turnovers and playing smart. Well, the Bears were hit-and-miss with the turnovers. In their first eight games, they forced 13 turnovers. However, they had just two turnovers in their next five games, not getting any in four of them. In their last four games, however, they had eight turnovers. Those last four games were against top-ten offenses.

In terms of smarts, the Chicago Bears reversed a long trend of committing too many penalties. Instead of being among the leaders in penalties and penalty yards, they had the fifth-fewest penalties called against them and had the fewest penalty yards against them.

Eberflus was successful in getting his players to buy into his principle. Now, with a hopefully better roster in 2023, we should see the wins start to pile up. Grade: B+