The Bears thought enough of defensive coordinator Vic Fangio to grant him at least a courtesy interview for their head-coaching job after John Fox was dispatched. Now they will find out at least a little about how Fangio might’ve worked as a head coach, with Fangio leaving to coach the Denver Broncos and the Broncos looming as a road trip on the Bears 2019 schedule.
In the meantime the task in front of the Bears is finding a replacement for Fangio, dubbed “evil genius” by linebacker Khalil Mack, and it will not an easy assignment despite the fact that Fangio’s successor takes over a unit already among the NFL’s best and with only one returning starter (Prince Amukamara) who will be age 30 when the 2019 season opens.
It can work out. But whether it can result in the equal of what the Bears built under Fangio and John Fox is anything but a given. And even if the numbers are there, an unknown is the personality of the group that had developed a complementary swagger under Fangio.
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Buy-in from players, which was there with Fangio and part of the reason the organization was so committed to retaining him and his staff after the Fox regime was fired.
Once before the Bears lost the coordinator of their top-ranked defense, when Buddy Ryan was hired by the Philadelphia Eagles to be their head coach after the Bears’ victory in Super Bowl XX. The following year (1986) the Bears set the NFL record for scoring defense and led the NFL in scoring defense again in 1988, all under Vince Tobin, who himself would go on to a head-coaching post with the Arizona Cardinals.
The defense, however, never regained the persona under Tobin that it had under Ryan. The personnel were largely the same but Hall of Fame defensive lineman Dan Hampton explained the mindset change as going from being attack dogs under Ryan to being guard dogs under the bend-but don’t-break Tobin.
Now the Bears begin the task of improving on excellence under a new coach. They accomplished that in the overall with Matt Nagy more than doubling the year-before win total of Fox and now face the daunting challenge of maintaining and bettering the performance of a unit that under Fangio went from top 10 in 2017 to top five in 2018.
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But how they accomplish that, and under whose direction, become problematic.
The easy answer to the latter is in the person of secondary coach Ed Donatell, who has been defensive coordinator for Atlanta, Green Bay and Washington. But Donatell is coming out of contract with the Bears and has a history with Fangio going back through a successful four-year run in San Francisco.
No other Bears assistant has NFL experience at the coordinator level: defensive line coach Jay Rodgers and linebackers coaches Glenn Pires and Brandon Staley.