Bears fire coach Matt Eberflus one day after Thanksgiving disaster loss
The Bears fired head coach Matt Eberflus one day after Chicago's 23-20 loss to the Lions on Thursday, their sixth straight defeat.
The Bears fired head coach Matt Eberflus one day after Chicago’s 23-20 loss to the Lions on Thursday that featured inexplicable clock management and sent the team to a sixth straight loss.
Offensive coordinator Thomas Brown will take over as interim head coach, the team announced.
It is the first time in Chicago’s 100 plus-year history that the franchise has fired a head coach midseason.
The move came within hours of his off-day press conference on Zoom on Friday morning in which he took responsibility for questionable play-calls during the Thanksgiving loss, including letting the clock run from 32 seconds down to six seconds with a timeout available.
Rookie quarterback Caleb Williams threw an incomplete pass to wideout Rome Odunze as time expired.
Eberflus said he met with team president Kevin Warren and general manager Ryan Poles after the loss for their normal postgame debrief and was supposed to meet with them again this afternoon — telling reporters he felt “confident” he’d be the Bears head coach moving forward.
“I talked to him about all the details about what the calls in terms of where we were and I thought the operation was good, just the penalties, I thought, put us behind the sticks a couple times there,” he said. “We were in scoring position and really could have owned the game from there.