Matt Eberflus has been head coach of the Chicago Bears for just over two weeks, but we’ve already heard plenty about how he wants to reshape the team’s culture using his HITS philosophy. Built on “hustle,” “intensity,” taking the ball away and taking care of the ball,” and playing “smart and situationally,” Eberflus’ central pillars are all based on effort, both mentally and physically. It may sound like typical coach-speak, but those close to Eberflus say those tenets are everything in his system. New Bears defensive coordinator Alan Williams came to Chicago from the Colts with Eberflus, and he said it’s more demanding than one may imagine, too.
“What we’re going to ask them to do is going to be一 it’s not difficult but it’s extremely hard,” Williams said. “We’re going to ask guys to give us 100% when they get on the field, 100% hustle. We’re going to ask guys to be intense. We’re going to ask them to do some things that they might not be used to doing.”
Williams was also frank when describing how the Colts players responded to Eberflus’ philosophy when he first installed it, in 2018.
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“They didn’t buy in at first,” Williams said. “It was difficult, but little by little they saw how the HITS philosophy translated into us playing well. They saw, based on us being able to measure those things, they saw how we were improving not in big leaps. Our thing was 1% better, 1% better and then ultimately those things turned into wins, and as we all know this league is measured in your wins and losses.
“That HITS principle turned into turnovers, turnovers turned into us winning football games. That was the buy-in when they saw the results of all that hard work, all the running to the ball and not just in games but every day in practice, the attention to detail in the walkthroughs. So, those were all things that helped with the buy-in.”
Things did turn around quickly for the Colts defense, as they went from the 30th ranked defense in terms of scoring and total defense in 2017, to the 10th-best scoring defense and 11th-best total defense in 2018. They improved from 20th in the NFL in takeaways to 10th. Most importantly, the record improved from 4-12 to 10-6.
Another key to getting the Colts on-board with HITS was meaningful accountability. It’s not enough to say “Hey, you weren’t hustling on that play,” so Eberflus and his staff have discrete ways to measure each part of the HITS philosophy. In this way, subjectivity is taken out of the equation.
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“It’s not just an arbitrary thing that we throw out there,” Williams said. “Then if they don’t reach the standard, we find creative ways to help guys.”
That’s the final piece of the puzzle for Williams: helping guys. It’s a sentiment that’s been echoed by both Eberflus and Ryan Poles too. The Bears will do their best to put their players in a position to succeed, even if it means changing things schematically. It’s something we heard in Desai’s defense, and the results were inconsistent. But Williams was confident that he and the rest of the Bears coaching staff would be able to help individuals improve.
If players see the coaches dedicating their work to help individual players thrive, one would expect individual players to reciprocate that dedication. And in the end, if everyone gets better, the team gets better too.
“The good thing about this staff that we’re trying to assemble is (hiring) guys that are phenomenal teachers, phenomenal communicators, and guys that have different ways of getting across to their players to get done what we need to get done.”