Matt Eberflus’ decision making at the end of Thursday’s loss to the Lions showed he should probably be on the hot seat. Then, his postgame comments made it clear he should be fired. But if you had any doubts, thinking that maybe there’s some chemistry within the organization that makes him worth keeping, that idea was also put to bed after the game.
Keenan Allen spoke to reporters after the game and delivered a crystal clear message on how things went down. “I feel like we did enough as players to win the game.”
They did enough. As players. It doesn’t exactly take a doctorate in reading between the lines to infer who he might be talking about here. If the players did enough to win the game and the team didn’t, then who else could possibly be catching the blame here? Obviously, Eberflus. And how do you come back from what’s going on here?
Keenan Allen with perhaps the most damning quote on Matt Eberflus:
“I feel like we did enough as players to win the game.”
— Dave (@dave_bfr) November 28, 2024
Eberflus was already on the hot seat in many people’s eyes. And on Thursday, in front of one of the biggest audiences of the season, he not only had his worst performance yet, but he doubled down on his mistake with postgame comments showing that he still thought he had made the right decisions. So at that point, he had lost both Bears fans and the NFL media. But hey, maybe he still had the support of the locker room, right?
Well now the locker room support is obviously dwindling. The players absolutely should feel cheated here. They did everything it took to bring the fight to the then-10-1 Detroit Lions as huge underdogs, battling back with a gutsy performance. Only for a coaching blunder to erase all of their hard work.
Players get annoyed at coaches all the time, I’m sure. But usually there is enough mutual respect that those annoyances stay within the walls of the organization. For a team leader like Allen to speak so brazenly in public about the coaching mistakes should be the nail in the coffin for Eberflus.
If he’s still the Bears’ head coach next Sunday against the San Francisco 49ers, then the entire front office is going to have some explaining to do as well.
