It’s old news at this point, but the Bears hired Matt Eberflus to be the HC.
https://www.nbcsports.com/chicago/bears/bears-reportedly-hire-head-coach-matt-eberflus-fans-react
Personally, I’m a bit whelmed. Most of the commentary about the hire is positive, but in 90% of cases that’s expected for any non-controversial hire. While he’s primarily been a defensive guy, he was the Cowboys passing game coordinator for a stint with some success. Though he wasn’t the OC and was doing double duty as the LBs coach at the time, so it’s anyone’s guess how important a role he had there.
Seems like he was a desirable candidate across the league and had other interviews, but he definitely isn’t having some meteoric rise. Perhaps that signals that there’s more substance there and he’s not a flash in the pan, but it’s hard to get super excited. Some of our reporting indicates that Eberflus is something of a “rah rah” run through a wall guy. He’s better at getting effort and buy-in from players than he is an Xs and Os guy. The suggestion is that he’ll build culture well but he’ll rely heavily on the Coordinators to game plan and execute. I really like the idea of an executive type HC who doesn’t style himself as a guru and doesn’t expect to call plays during the game. I think that’s a better path to success and it allows the HC to focus on in-game stuff like clock management, personnel and situational football. But…I’d have liked a guy with a bit more time as a high-level coordinator or assistant HC. Plenty of position coaches have turned out to be great HCs so we’ll just have to hope for the best.
The hiring process has made a lot of headlines. The Bears brass, with the assistance of Bill Polian, has been interviewing HCs and GMs in parallel and had already flagged Eberflus as a “finalist” before they officially hired Poles. This made a lot of people anxious and called into question how empowered Poles really was. The PR team in Halas Hall has worked hard to put out the message that Poles has absolute control over HC hires and that Poles interviewed and selected Eberflus himself. To be frank, this smells like a bit of BS to me.
While I trust that Poles blessed the hire, I can’t believe that he wouldn’t have insisted on interviewing at least one candidate that wasn’t already on the “finalists” list. We didn’t interview a single Chiefs candidate which feels weird considering where Poles came from…though maybe that’s just a gentleman’s agreement Poles is honoring with his old bosses. I’m personally happy we didn’t hire Quinn or Caldwell, Eberflus was the less-known of the 3 public finalists and if forced to pick one he’s the guy I’d have selected. But that really just speaks to the weakness of the other candidates on this list. My main fear is that we’re sort of repeating a Pace/Fox situation where they had to wait on the GM hire and were subsequently forced to rush the HC hire.
Daboll not even making the finalist list is frankly shocking. Also, sounds like Harbaugh is staying in Michigan for a while. He never really seemed to be a serious candidate anywhere though it seems like the Raiders might still be trying to pull a Gruden 2.0 type hire.
We’ll all be watching closely to see how Eberflus fills out his staff. That feels more important now than ever before. We simply can’t have a revolving door at OC.