Matt Nagy should be embarrassed by what happened on Monday night originally appeared on NBC Sports Chicago
Maybe it's fitting that no one could hear the start of Matt Nagy's press conference. The coach's disastrous night continued straight through the Bears' 24-10 loss and into his postgame availability, when most of his opening statement was muted to all 40 or so media members on the Zoom call. But if you take Nagy at his word, you didn't miss much.
"This is a game today where there’s not a whole lot to say in that locker room other than, in these situations we’ve got to be able to show what type of resolve we have to bounce back from something like this," he said. "But this is a part of the NFL. This is a part of the league. How are we going to respond? What are we going to do? That’s our next challenge.”
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That may be true, but I imagine another challenge Nagy might have is sleeping on the flight home. He coached poorly on Monday night, perhaps as poorly as ever. It takes 20 seconds to look at their 3rd down conversion rate (4-14) or the total net yardage (279) or the fact that they had six times as many penalties as offensive touchdowns and get a pretty good sense of how things went. Take 20 more seconds to listen to what everyone said after the game and you get an even better sense of how things, on a larger level, are going.
"I mean if I had the answer right now in this moment, we probably wouldn’t be talking about it," Nick Foles said. "I think it’s just ya know, keeping it real, this is where you test your culture. This is where you test the people you work with. Whether it’s the coaches and players. Like who are we going to be?"
If that's what it takes, the Bears should be thrilled. If Nagy – who still has a healthy excess of job security, so calm down – can proudly claim any success over the first three years of his Bears' tenure, it's the culture he brought with him to Halas Hall. But culture doesn't leave timeouts on the board to end a half, just like culture hasn't stopped the Bears from continuing to make unforced errors coming out of timeouts. The Bears have failed to score 21 points in over half of Nagy's games as a head coach, an alarming fact that still feels, somehow, under-discussed.
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"This is hard. I’ve never been a part of this before," he said. "It’s a situation where for all of us very frustrating trying to figure out answers. The hard part is, when you care so much, you’re trying so hard to figure out that identity – and where we’re at, and the why part. That’s the part that stings – just trying to get that thing right. And it hasn’t happened."
It's hard to be a good coach with a bad quarterback, and it's really hard to be a good coach with a bad quarterback playing behind a bad offensive line. But Nagy traded for Foles, and then benched Mitch Trubisky 10 quarters after he beat Foles out for the starting job. The offense was always going to be a work in progress, they said, even after the switch. Four games later, we're still just seeing a lot of work without any progress.
"And It’s not clicking right now. It’s not," Nagy added. "As any competitor, and I’m as competitive a person as there is, that’s the part where I have to challenge myself to stay patient and challenge myself to not get frustrated as well, and continue to keep coaching to the best I can and look at everything.
There's no doubt that the Bears are thrilled to have Nagy as a competitor and as a leader. Those are great things to have, but right now the Bears need a really good coach.
