My Thoughts On The Bears Firing Matt Nagy & Ryan Pace
We were 99.9% sure that Nagy was going to get canned so I'll start with him.
The Nagy era started so promising. I cannot for the life of me find the blog I wrote about him after he won the 2018 AP Coach of the Year, but I know the gist of it was about how this is just the beginning and that I couldn't be happier that Nagy was going to be the guy leading the charge for the Bears for years to come.
And man, is that fucking depressing to think back on because it was a brutal 3 years after that. Simply put - the man was hired here because he was supposed to be one of the sharpest offensive minds in football and I think we all saw pretty quickly that that was the furthest thing from the truth. That 2018 team was mostly held up by our defense and once they slowly regressed we needed our offense to take the next step and it never did, but instead became a bottom unit in the league.
Alot of people like to point at how the locker room never turned on each other as evidence that Matt Nagy was a good leader and I don't necessarily disagree with that because I think Matt Nagy seems like a a good guy who also to communicates well with his players. But, his ultimate undoing in my opinion was his stubbornness when it came to calling plays. Being OC and HC at the same time is harder than people think. Only the real top dogs do it well and that wasn't Matt. Rather than adapt he died and that's really all there is to it.
The biggest news of the day though is that Ryan Pace is gone as well because reports were saying that he was going to be promoted to Head of Football Ops and boy am I fucking happy that's not true. Ryan's situation is alot simpler to break down in my eyes.
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- You don't get 3 head coach's
- You don't get 8 drafts
- You can't whiff on the Head Coach
- You can't whiff on a top pick 3 QB
You also can't whiff on the QB replacements (Foles not Fields), mortgage the future with reckless salary cap management and trade a ton of draft capital and only have 1 playoff appearance to show for it. I'm not counting that bullshit Nickelodeon game, but if you want to so be it that's still not enough success in a 7 year window when 7 years is a century in the NFL.
Sure there were definitely bright spots that Pace had, but ultimately failure at the biggest decisions did him in.
So the search begins now and I know this is where people still have no hope because these guys at the top seem to never get it right and refuse to hire someone smarter than them to correct it, but we sadly have no choice until they sell the team or somehow snap out of it. They say that a broken clock is still always right twice a day and that's really the only optimism we can have when it comes to George & Ted bringing in the next person to run the show.
We'll talk more about that later as today is more about the Pace & Nagy era ending though.
Bear Down.