I think there are 4 more winnable games (MN, ATL, AZ, and GB). Given that it’s always been a rebuild project, I think we keep Poles, Flus, and Fields if we get 7 wins, especially if we look okay in the losses.
The team is on the way up, still playing hard, and I think 3 years is a more reasonable timeline.
My honest opinion? I don’t care a lot either way. I would lean towards firing everyone, but if they don’t I don’t think it’s a tragedy.
Very very very few coaches are actually good and a few are very bad but the vast majority are Just Guys whose fortunes rise and fall on QB play, luck and the shifting scheme meta.
I have some concerns about some of Poles’ apparent philosophies, but he clearly wasn’t building with years 1 and 2 in mind.
If you go to the 31 other NFL team subreddits, you’ll find probably 25 of them copy-pasting all the same stuff we say about how their owner/gm/coach are the stupidest ever and nothing could ever change until they get rid of them.
Finally a thread where I don’t feel insane reading people’s comments. I disagree a little with your preference but I agree with your sentiment.
Getsy I feel is a gotta go no matter what, he’s made the same mistake two years in a row and there’s really no sign that he’s changing his philosophy.
Flus i really really don’t give a shit, he’s got the defense looking a little better since Allan Williams was fired and we expected this defense to be awful at the start of the year. I think it’s easy to hate a head coach when the team is losing but there’s nothing to really point to that’s fireable. Like you said a lot of coaches are jags.
I really like poles’ philosophy and think he’s staying no matter what. I like how he treats draft picks as liquid asset. Sure he didn’t make the right move on claypool but he’s gotten so much more back from other places. His OL is coming together very nicely. He has put there Bears in a very nice situation to abandon ship on him though lol.
I’m a Fields guy but I really don’t see him being the qb next year. I think he’s got a lot of the intangibles that he could still be successful despite the body of work he’s put up so far. Don’t get me wrong he’s got glaring weaknesses. I just feel he’s got as good of chance to clean those up and turn it around as any dude coming out of college has the chance to succeed. If you’ll let me be delusional if poles must draft a qb, I still don’t see any reason to ship Fields off unless there’s a haul of picks coming back. Just force him to be Taysom Hill if he wants play time and take a comp pick if he walks in 25
I agree, Flus has reached out to and touched all the young players on the Bears and helped with their development in ways that they never felt from Alvin Williams
I disagree with the thought that there isn’t a reason to fire Flus. My main struggle with Flus is his control of the team. We have the 3rd most penalties, and we are tied for most false starts with the Panthers. Penalties, and especially false starts, are a sign of a coaching weakness. These are fundamentals of football, and things that are focused on at the high school and college levels. If our team can’t even wait until the ball is snapped then that is a problem at the practice level, and a symptom of bad overall coaching. Usually this is because practices are focusing on making plays rather than fundamentals.
You can also see it in the tackles. Every coach will tell you that the way to tackle is to wrap up the person, so even if you don’t take them down you are still inhibiting movement. Instead we have guys throwing shoulders. Yes, throwing a shoulder will sometimes take people down, but if it doesn’t the ball carrier has nothing slowing them down after the hit. We see way too many blown tackles because the defense isn’t wrapping people up. Again, a sign of poor coaching.
I don’t actually think that Flus is a bad coach, but I don’t think he is a coach for a young team that really needs to work on gelling as a team, that needs to focus on fundamentals of football, that needs to develop in almost all areas including QB. He would be great taking over a team of vets, but he’s just not the type of coach we need.
I do think that we could benefit from a college D1 head coach. They are coaches that are used to working with less experienced players. They are good at creating teams atmospheres because their teams drastically change year after year. They are perfect to rebuild with rookies. I would love to see a D1 HC take over the rebuild.
I would be mostly here if it was just our 1st and a 7-10 record precluded us from getting a top QB in the draft. But with what’s very likely the 1.01-1.02, we simply cannot re-repeat the mistakes of the past by handing a highly drafted rookie QB to a lame duck coach and then stunting his development by changing the entire staff before year 2 (see also Fox-Trubs, Nagy-Fields). If we want to keep Flus/Getsy we need to commit to keeping them at least another 3 years. Does anyone want to do that? I sure don’t.
Wait, Poles wasn’t building with years 1 and 2 in mind? I mean, year 1 sure … but year 2?
All last year the narrative here was “yeah we’re really bad, but we have a ton of cap room and great draft capital this offseason, we will be much better next year after we spend and shore up the issues.” And now it’s, clearly we weren’t ever building to be decent this year?
We were all over the “which team is going to be the most improved in 2023?” lists last year, and we are still miserable looking at a top-5 pick. This thread talking about running it back with another year of Fields (and Poles and Eberflus) is weird to me, given that 2 of our 3 wins so far were with Fields on the bench.
Ah the old he wasn’t even trying excuse.
Please explain trading 2nd round picks if he wasn’t even trying to compete this year.
Poles did try, he’s just very bad.