Mikefive wrote: ↑Tue Nov 30, 2021 8:33 pm
If I'm looking at the Bears job, I'm certainly not thinking it's a top half of the league job. You can say ownership mostly lets GMs and coaches do their thing. That's certainly a positive. And it's an original team in a giant market which seems positive.
Despite those plusses, there's an elephant in the room that can't be denied. The Bears perform consistently below average. What do I mean by that? By the numbers in a 32 team league, the Bears should have over the last 32 years...
- Won 50% of their games. Bears are 248-275 (47.4%)
- Won 8 division titles. Bears have 7.
- Made the playoffs 12 times. Bears have 8.
- Made NFC Championship appearance 4 times. Bears have 2.
- Appeared in Super Bowl twice, winning once. Bears made it once and lost.
- Over that 32 year span, the Bears have 5 playoff wins. FIVE.
- And achieving those numbers would only put the Bears at... mediocre. And they're not hitting that by any measure.
If you're a coach or GM who wants to come to Chicago, you have to ask yourself why that is. It's not that the team doesn't spend money. They do. So what's the problem then? You have to look at what has been constant over that time. That's the ownership and the team President. Even if you think all the GMs and/or coaches all suck, who hires and leads those guys? It's at least one McCaskey and Ted Phillips.
I was all set to agree with you.
After all - the Bears are a bad franchise and their results are subpar. That's undeniable.
But I think they've cleaned up a lot of past mistakes (not wanting a real GM, not spending on front office, not having quality facilities, etc).
And I think their biggest problem now is their inability to accurate assess the state of the team. More specifically, they can't recognize or admit a bad situation until it's gone full nuclear.
For example: I knew Nagy was a total fraud, the window for this build was over, and Pace & Nagy needed to go mid-2020. The Bears couldn't figure it out until it was slapping them in the face with a 3-7 record, a 3rd season with a long losing streak, and players revolting against the coach. They bought an unnecessary year of garbage with their inability to see it coming.
Another example: Back when they were churning out mildly above average, but not real contending, seasons around 2009-12. It took them way too long to pull the trigger on Angelo & Lovie. And when they did, they clung to this ridiculous notion that there was still window left to contend in. If they'd pulled the trigger earlier, sure. But by the time action was taken, it was too late. That build was done and it was time for a rebuild. But they couldn't see it and had to put us through a miserable 5-11 season for them to grasp reality.
That problem - not knowing a situation is unsalvageable until it's completely blown up - really isn't one that's going to impact a brand new regime coming in. It's only on the tail end of an already failed regime that it comes into play. So that shouldn't be scaring prospective hires so much.
Unless, of course, they think a new HC & GM should be playing to win immediately in 2022, without giving them at least 1 year to fix the mess left behind. But with a team likely to finish around 6-11, I'm thinking even they can't be that stupid.