People were going to have immediate reactions to the news that Matt Eberflus was the new Chicago Bears head coach. Most of them were predictable. A first-time guy is such a big risk. Bad idea to hire a defensive-minded coach when your top priority should be helping Justin Fields blossom. The same arguments that tend to follow such hires like it these days. However, not everybody was against it.
Some believe the Bears quietly snagged one of the best coaches on the market. Despite a lack of flash, the man has the necessary character traits of a head coach. Conor Orr of the MMQB praised the move. He has followed Eberflus for the past few years and has become convinced he is somebody that is going to prove so many people wrong about the stigma of defensive head coaches. He even went so far as to call the move a "home run."
"Eberflus is not going to register as a sexy choice, though we’ll get to why this was a home run hire in a bit... ...By hiring the best coaching fit for the job, the Bears are helping the league, in some small way, peel from the idea that a coach’s job is to directly alleviate the woes of a team’s best player. In most cases, a quarterback."
The case he presents is a convincing one.
Due to the success of names like Sean Payton, Sean McVay, Kyle Shanahan, and Matt Lafleur it has become too easy to assume that the only way to win championships in today's NFL is to have an offensive-minded head coach. All while guys like Mike Vrabel, Mike Tomlin, Bill Belichick, Pete Carroll, and Ron Rivera have had success going back years. Good coaches are good coaches. It doesn't matter what their background is. Then Orr provided more direct evidence of why Eberflus has the chops.A few weeks back on an episode of Richard Sherman’s podcast, he was interviewing Titans safety Kevin Byard and going through some of the nuances of Tennessee’s defensive scheme. Plenty of man defense. Some quarters coverage. Fire zones. A small blitz package. “We do a lot of stuff,” Byard said. “I wouldn’t say we’re like Indianapolis…” “They do some crazy, wild stuff,” Sherman said. “Stuff I’d never seen before I saw them do it.” Through his career as a defensive coordinator, Eberflus has consistently awed. He’s taken sparse units and led them to admirable seasons. He has shaken, spilled and reorganized his scheme to fit the personnel he’s inherited and developed star players along the way. It was a body of work deserving of a head coaching position back in 2019, when our analyst (and current NFL staffer!) Andy Benoit first endorsed Eberflus. It was deserving of one now.
