Chris Beatty Drops Unintentional Bombshell About Matt Eberflus
Matt Eberflus getting fired was inevitable. Everybody with common sense saw it coming. You don’t have the worst losing streak in franchise history, fire six assistant coaches, including two offensive coordinators, and post the worst record ever in one-score games and get to keep your job. There were plenty of reasons why Eberflus was a failure. His inability to elevate the offense was an obvious one. Not taking accountability for his mistakes was another. Perhaps most frustrating was the horrible clock management and late-game decision-making. Fans and media alike knew it. Yet the craziest part? His own assistants discussed it behind his back. Chris Beatty admitted as much during his latest press conference.
The Bears’ wide receivers coach was promoted to offensive coordinator after Thomas Brown took over as interim head coach. He told Adam Hoge of CHGO and others that the two men talked about the game management problems even before Eberflus was fired.
“Brown kind of knew that was one of my things,” Beatty said, adding that the two had discussions about the Bears’ game management issues before Brown took over as the interim head coach. “When he became in charge it was easy for us to say, hey we need to clean these parts of our organization up and be able to be in a position to where we don’t have those same things happen to us.”
Chris Beatty proves how bad it was behind the scenes.
You know you probably aren’t a good head coach when even your own assistants are questioning your capability behind your back. Not that this should be a surprise. These men get paid to coach and analyze football at the highest level. If fans could see Eberflus was in way over his head, they saw it too. Chris Beatty isn’t naive. He’s been around the game for decades. No doubt he wished the Bears could’ve found a solution to the problem sooner, but it was obvious the head coach lacked the wherewithal to make it happen. It seems he and Brown knew there was a chance Eberflus might get fired. If and when that happened, they first needed to improve internal communication so such mistakes were far less frequent.