Matt Nagy is still the head coach of the Bears. He still might be the head coach of the Bears in 2021.
While it feels like the walls at Halas Hall are caving in on the third-year coach – as well as general manager Ryan Pace – they still have jobs, and in all likelihood will keep them through at least the end of the 2020 season.
But since I’ve been getting a few tweets about this guy recently, I want to look at the case for one guy whose name, surely, will come up if Nagy is fired in January: Jim Harbaugh.
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It feels like Harbaugh’s time at Michigan is coming to a close – he’d enter 2021 as a lame duck and the Wolverines are a miserable 2-4 in this bizarre, reckless college football season. Yahoo’s Pete Thamel reported earlier in November Harbaugh would be open to returning to the NFL, where he went 44-19-1 with the San Francisco 49ers from 2011-2014.
But first: Some NFL team has to want to hire him. Harbaugh is no longer the slam-dunk coaching hire he would’ve been five years ago thanks to a declining trajectory in Ann Arbor.
The Bears drafted Harbaugh, a quarterback, in 1987 and he played seven seasons in Chicago, so there is a connection there inside Halas Hall.
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While it’s an understatement to say he left the 49ers on bad terms, he not only won in San Francisco, but he did something Nagy has not: Adapt to the players he had. He reached a Super Bowl with Colin Kaepernick as his quarterback, teaming up with Greg Roman to build an offense around Kaepernick’s talents. His defenses – coordinated by old friend Vic Fangio – were merciless.
His prickly personality ultimately led to a much-anticipated exit from the Bay Area, but maybe the Bears don’t need another nice guy coaching their team.
So I can see how, if the Bears need a new coach in 2021, the McCaskey family could talk themselves into Harbaugh – even though they may be the only NFL team interested in bringing him back to the league.
But two questions here: Would Harbaugh be on board with – and have the patience for – a full tear-down and rebuild, which is what it looks like the Bears need at this point? And how much should his failures at Michigan – failures to recruit and develop a quarterback, failures to assemble a good coaching staff, failures to keep his team engaged, failures to beat an archrival (which matters a lot to the McCaskey family) – matter to the NFL?
The first question may be a moot point if Michigan parts ways with Harbaugh after this season. His stock will be low, few teams may be interested and if he wants back in immediately, he might just have to take whatever gig he can get. But losing clearly wears on Harbaugh; that’s the case for all coaches, of course, though it just feels different with how Harbaugh is losing at Michigan.
And six years have passed since Harbaugh last roamed an NFL sideline; while he proved himself to be an adaptable coach in the 2010s, it’s an unknown if the 56-year-old still have that same mindset in the 2020s.
I tend to think there will better candidates out there if the Bears move on from Nagy after this season – which, again, is not a guaranteed to happen. Harbaugh has a shelf life wherever he goes; the Bears need a coach for the next seven years, not the next four.
And hey, if the Bears are going to poach their next coach from the Big Ten, they shouldn’t look to Ann Arbor. They should look about 20 minutes away in Evanston.
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