How Matt Nagy, and his mantras, are failing the Bears

Share

There’s something deeply concerning about how the one person who hasn’t yet figured out the Bears is Matt Nagy. What was once 5-1 is now 5-6, and as their season spirals faster than any throw a Bears’ QB has made this season, their head coach’s continued insistence that this group is simply one or two soul-searching sessions away from a breakthrough would feel terribly inauthentic if Bears fans were still capable of feeling anything. After the third-straight ‘most embarrassing’ loss of the year, Nagy sat down at the podium and played all the usual hits – and in doing so, capped off a night full of tactical errors with one for the road: the assumption that anyone’s still listening. 

“... I just felt like [The Packers] got after us the entire game – from the first quarter until the very end,” he said after the 41-25 loss. “That’s basically where we’re at right now. Talked to the guys in the locker room afterwards. There’s guys that care. I think that’s what’s important to us. But they care and they know that we’ve got to do it on the field; it’s not about what we say.”

Nagy's not wrong when he insists that it's “not about what we say,” but an explanation for why he keeps saying those things in the first place is well overdue. Why does he talk effusively about Mitch Trubisky’s all-time great week of practice only to have the QB take a three yard loss instead of throwing the ball away, or throw two different interceptions into triple coverage? Did those grand bye week plans of re-establishing the run really only amount to 11 David Montgomery carries? Getting Cole Kmet (3 targets on Sunday) more involved in the offense has been a priority for the last two months. ‘Be You’ might be a mantra for Nagy, but at this point, for most everyone else, it’s just a punchline. 

“I just think that right now with our team that this is the stuff through the season that you go through,” he said. “It’s about fighting adversity, it’s about building cultures and staying together. That’s where we’re at. So that’s what I do, that’s what our coaches do, that’s what our players do. We stay together and we understand where we’re at, and that when you have games like this, you’ve got to figure out, you’ve got to soul search and you’ve got to be able to stop the bleeding. 

“There’s a couple directions you can go. But my job as a leader is to make sure that they understand that.”

If the Bears are still trying to figure out what direction the season’s going in, Nagy’s already failed – they’ll wake up on Monday in third place and on track to miss the playoffs for the second time in Nagy’s three years here. The head coach insisted that the post-game message in the Bears’ locker room was an encouraging one, and if that’s the case, someone should have told Mitch Trubisky, who didn’t seem to have any idea what his immediate future held. Someone should have told Allen Robinson, who found it ‘tough to say’ whether the offense worked any better with Trubisky back, or Khalil Mack, who repeatedly stressed how ‘unacceptable’ the losses were, or Anthony Miller, who tweeted about how that ‘shit is embarrassing.’ The Bears love to brag about the culture they’ve built while conveniently leaving out the fact that said culture isn’t winning them a whole lot of important games. 

“We're not going to be down,” Nagy added. “We understand. We're frustrated. We're pissed off. We're angry. Every feeling that you have, we have. But we got to fix it. And we got to do it on the football field. We got to do it on the field. And so this is where you rely on your leaders to do it. It's less talk and more action. But again, the people that you bring in here, times like this is where you rely on them. That's where I have the ultimate trust in our guys.”

It’s nice that Nagy has ultimate trust in his guys – and for the money that Ryan Pace has committed to a lot of them, you’d certainly hope that’s still the case. But as the Bears fall ass backwards into what’s looking more and more like this group’s final stand, the more interesting question is whether any of Nagy’s guys still have ultimate trust in him. 
 

Contact Us