What’s New

The calendar gets real ugly now.

Billy Donovan has searched it for breaks, looked up and down for small cracks to get back into the lab and get some much needed work in, but the Bulls coach knows the reality of the situation.

Twenty-two games over the next 36 days, and playing six back-to-backs in that span?

An already taxing season is about to get even rougher.

“What we’ve got to try and do is … this is unique just because they put some games in that we had postponed, and some of them are here before the All-Star Game which makes things condensed,” Donovan said, when discussing the schedule between now and the All-Star Weekend. “You got to try and balance, ‘How do we continue to get better and improve where maybe we can’t get on the floor and do things physically?’ There’s just not the days in between games. And how do we try and keep guys fresh?”

First things first? The getting on the floor issue for some practice time.

Good luck with that for Donovan and his staff. The next week alone is ugly for the Bulls, playing five games in the next seven days.

Donovan could try and sneak a practice or two in next week, but that would be rough. Monday’s game in Memphis is an afternoon tip-off, so the following day — Jan. 18 — works because the Bulls are at home against the Cavaliers a day later.

But Donovan also admitted that he’ll have to check with his medical staff on the usage of his players, especially because of the expected intensity this week puts on the table.

Monday was an off-day for the Bulls, with the Pistons in town for the Tuesday appetizer. Then it’s an ESPN game against the Nets on Wednesday, another off day following the back-to-back, and the Warriors in town on Friday — again for another nationally televised game.

Off to Boston for a Saturday night showdown, another off day after a back-to-back, and then the game against the Grizzlies.

That’s three games against very good NBA teams, and one underachieving team thrown in the mix.

The stress put on Donovan’s “Big Three” of Zach LaVine, DeMar DeRozan and Nikola Vucevic will be monitored, with the coach admitting there were no plans to rest guys or fall on the load management sword. Not yet at least.

Everything will remain in play, with Donovan pointing out the importance of communication between staff and player.

So how will the coach get the time to fix a defense he’s seen slipping the last month without practice time? It won’t be easy, but it definitely needs fixing. Over the nine-game winning streak, Donovan watched his defensive rating rank 20th in that time, slipping out of the top 10 and down to 13th (108.5) to start this week.

His offense is still in a good spot at fifth overall (112), but Donovan knows that the teams that are serious contenders tend to rank in the top 10 in rating on both ends of the floor.

“There’s a bigger picture coming,” Donovan said. “As you start to build out who you are, I still think there’s room for growth from our team.”

What works in Donovan’s favor will be his locker room. He has high-character veterans that don’t necessarily need the practice floor to fix things. This group has shown that simply getting the team together for a “breakfast meeting” rather than a shootaround has netted results.

Get the muffins and coffee ready.

“If we want to be the team we want to be and we know we can be, it has to be for 48 minutes,” Vucevic said. “We’ve shown we can do it.”

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The rare winter grassland fire that recently blew up along Colorado’s Front Range was rare, but experts say similar wildfires will becme more common as climate change warms the planet, and suburbs grow in fire-prone areas.

“These fires are different from most of the fires we’ve been seeing across the West in the sense that they’re grass fires, and they’re occurring in the winter,” said Jonathan Overpeck, a professor in the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability. “Ultimately, things are going to continue to get worse unless we stop climate change.”

The Colorado wildfire forced 35,000 people from their homes, burning through a pair of heavily populated suburbs between Denver and Boulder. Though the cause is under investigation, experts say it’s clear what allowed it to spread so fast.

“With any snow on the ground, this absolutely would not have happened in the way that it did,” said Keith Musselman, a snow hydrologist in Boulder, Colo. “It was really the grass and the dry landscape that allowed this fire to jump long distances in a short period of time.”

Three ingredients were needed to start this fire — fuels, a warm climate and an ignition source, said Jennifer Balch, a fire scientist with the University of Colorado, Boulder. “And then you add a fourth ingredient, wind, and that’s when it became a disaster.”

Temperatures in Colorado between June and December were the warmest on record, Balch said. The grasses grew thick because they had a wet spring, but then they saw no moisture in recent weeks before the fire.

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis called the fire a “a horrific convergence” of destructive wind gusts that hit the area following the unseasonably dry and warm winter.

“We know that with the climate we face higher risks,” Polis said, “right here in the city and suburbs.”

Balch said Colorado is a dry landscape filled with flammable material for much of the year, “and those chunks of time are getting longer with climate change.”

The lesson learned throughout this event is that the “wildland-urban interface is way bigger than we thought it was,” Balch said.

That means a wider area is under threat of wildfire. That border area — in which structures built by people meet undeveloped wildland prone to fire — always has been the foothills, she said. Firefighters in Boulder consider the interface west of Broadway — a busy road that passes through the center of town. But this fire was sparked east of that line, next to thousands of houses that have sprouted up on the east side of the Rockies since the 1990s, Balch said.

“There were stretches between Denver and Fort Collins that had no development, but now it’s just like one long continuous development track,” Balch said. “And those homes are built with materials that are very flammable — wood siding, asphalt roofing. We need to completely rethink how we’re building homes.”

The other important change is understanding how these fires start in the first place, she said.

“There’s no natural source of ignition at this time of year,” she said. “There’s no lightning. It’s either going to be infrastructure-related, or it’s going to be human-caused.”

Over the past two decades, 97% of wildfires were started by people, according to a study by the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Causes have ranged from accidents at construction sites to a car with a hot tailpipe to tossed cigarettes.

“We need to be thinking about how our daily activities can contribute ignitions or sparks that start wildfires,” Balch said.

Unless people stop climate change by cutting back on fossil fuels, wildfires will threaten communities, Overpeck said.

“There’s little doubt in my mind that the conditions conducive to really bad wildfire, whether it’s grass or forest, are only going to get worse,” he said.

As more people move to areas where wildfires occur, the threat increases.

“We’re building towns and cities and infrastructure,” Overpeck said. “And so it’s just a matter of time before we have whole towns burning down like we had in California and events like this in Colorado.”

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Monday morning, the Chicago Bears did the unexpected — well, half-expected at least — when they fired both head coach Matt Nagy and general manager Ryan Pace.

After four seasons with the Bears, Nagy was 34-33 and lost both of his playoff appearances as head coach.

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The Chicago Bears actually made the moves many were hoping they would do on Monday morning, announcing the firings of both head coach Matt Nagy and general manager Ryan Pace. The firings end an era of Bears football in which the team had two playoff appearances but went winless in those two games.

And now, a new era is being ushered in.

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Baylor is the unanimous No. 1 in The Associated Press men’s college basketball poll once again, while fifth-ranked Southern California climbed to its highest ranking in nearly five decades.

The reigning national champion Bears earned all 61 first-place votes in Monday’s poll for the fourth time in five weeks. Baylor (15-0) beat Oklahoma and TCU last week to push its winning streak to 21 games dating to last year’s title run in the Indianapolis bubble.

Gonzaga, UCLA, Auburn and USC rounded out the top five. The Tigers jumped five spots to No. 4, while the Trojans rose two spots to hit their highest ranking since last reaching No. 5 in December 1974.

Arizona, Purdue, Duke, Kansas and Michigan State rounded out a reshuffled group of the same top-10 teams from last week.

No. 13 Wisconsin had the biggest jump of the 12 teams that climbed in this week’s poll, leaping 10 spots after beating Purdue, Iowa and Maryland in Big Ten play. No. 12 LSU rose nine spots after wins against ranked Kentucky and Tennessee teams.

No. 24 Alabama had the biggest tumble of the 10 teams that fell in Monday’s poll, sliding nine spots after losing to a Missouri team that was 6-7 entering the game. No. 21 Texas and No. 23 Providence each fell seven spots.

Illinois re-entered the poll at No. 25 after opening the year at No. 11 but falling out before the end of November. That came after the AP Top 25 featured no new teams for each of the past two weeks.

The Top 25

1. Baylor 15-0

2. Gonzaga 12-2

3. UCLA 10-1

4. Auburn 14-1

5. Southern Cal 13-0

6. Arizona 12-1

7. Purdue 13-2

8. Duke 12-2

9. Kansas 12-2

10. Michigan St. 13-2

11. Houston 14-2

12. LSU 14-1

13. Wisconsin 13-2

14. Villanova 11-4

15. Iowa St. 13-2

16. Ohio St. 10-3

17. Xavier 12-2

18. Kentucky 12-3

19. Texas Tech 11-3

20. Seton Hall 11-3

21. Texas 12-3

22. Tennessee 10-4

23. Providence 14-2

24. Alabama 11-4

25. Illinois 11-3

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Today is a historic day for the Chicago Bears franchise. They actually fired General Manager Ryan Pace. Honestly, this move genuinely surprised me. I called them out a little over a week ago amid all the reports that Pace would be safe that ownership is settling for a half-hearted culture change so McCaskey could continue working with his friends.

However, I was wrong and I have never been happier to be wrong about the Bears in my life. Their moves today signal change. We don’t know what change yet exactly, but these moves are a sign of not only the Bears realizing that they are teetering on the verge of becoming a bottom-feeder franchise, but also a strong indication of their belief that Justin Fields will become the Chicago Bears first ever superstar quarterback.

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When Matt Nagy took the Chicago Bears‘ coaching job in 2018, his top priority was to level up a quarterback who had struggled the previous season as a first-round pick.

Four years later, his successor will face the same challenge.

The Bears fired Nagy and general manager Ryan Pace on Monday. Nagy couldn’t produce a consistent winner after inheriting Mitch Trubisky from predecessor John Fox, while Pace has been unable to solve the team’s quarterback position since he inherited Jay Cutler when the Bears hired him 2015. The Bears moved on from Trubisky last spring, but the struggles of his replacement — rookie Justin Fields — sealed the fate of both Nagy and Pace. And no matter whom the Bears hire to replace them, they will have little choice but to try to make it work with Fields.

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You could make the argument Nagy took a job with one hand tied behind his back, weighed down by a quarterback who will go down as one of the biggest busts of this generation. (The Bears drafted Trubisky No. 2 overall in 2017, ahead of Deshaun Watson and Patrick Mahomes.) That the Bears went 25-13 in games Trubisky started under Nagy could be viewed as a resume booster, not an argument to fire him.

Eleven of those victories came in their first season together, when Nagy introduced an offense that limited Trubisky’s responsibilities and sprinkled in a series of innovative formations and playcalls to score points. That model proved unsustainable in the long term, however, and the Bears’ efforts to stack veteran backups who could rescue a playoff team if needed — Chase Daniels and Nick Foles among them — were not effective.

Even so, Trubisky was in many ways better in his rookie season of 2017 than Fields was in 2021. By the eye test, Fields turned in one of the NFL’s worst performances by a quarterback all season. By Total Quarterback Rating, which incorporates a cross-section of metrics from third-down and red zone throws to scrambling for first downs, Fields was historically bad in 2021. His QBR of 26 ranked last in the NFL and was the fourth lowest for anyone who has made at least 10 starts since the statistic was conceived in 2006. (Trubisky’s rookie QBR of 33.3 ranks No. 21 on that list.)

It’s not realistic to think that the Bears’ next general manager could give their next head coach a fresh start, at least not the kind that the Arizona Cardinals gave Kliff Kingsbury when they drafted Kyler Murray at No. 1 overall a year after selecting Josh Rosen (24.1 QBR) at No. 10 overall. It was only the second time in modern draft history a team had drafted a quarterback in the first round in consecutive years.

Maximizing quarterback Justin Fields will be a top priority for whoever takes over for Matt Nagy and Ryan Pace. Photo by Robin Alam/Icon Sportswire

Why couldn’t the Bears do the same thing for Nagy’s successor, with a record that would put them in the top 10 of the 2022 draft? Because part of their deal to move up and draft Fields was giving up their 2022 first-round pick to the New York Giants. There are plenty of reasons why teams almost never move on from first-round quarterbacks after one season, from salary cap management to scarcity to pride, but the Bears don’t have the draft assets to replace Fields even if their new coach doesn’t want him.

The Bears’ history at the position is no secret. They’re the only franchise never to have a 4,000-yard passer, and it’s not for lack of trying. Their 37 starters at the position since 1989 is tied for the second most in the NFL over that period, and it’s worth noting that they aggressively pursued Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson last spring, according to ESPN’s Adam Schefter. Wilson could become available this offseason, but the Bears’ lack of a 2022 first-round pick would pose a hurdle for any kind of blockbuster deal.

All of which makes maximizing Fields a top priority for the Bears as they search for their next general manager and coach. It can’t be the only criteria, however, especially in selecting their coach. Too many NFL teams are blinded by pursuit of quarterback “gurus,” without inspecting and vetting candidates for skills such as leadership, organization and emotional intelligence. But whomever takes these jobs should know their success will likely be tied to improvement from a young quarterback they played no role in drafting.

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The Chicago Bears fired coach Matt Nagy and GM Ryan Pace on Monday after the team finished with a 6-11 record this season.

Nagy was named NFL Coach of the Year after his first season in 2018, when he led the Bears to a 12-4 record and reached the playoffs for the first time in eight years. He earned praise that season for his offensive wrinkles and humble disposition, but the Bears couldn’t sustain that success over the ensuing three seasons.

They finished 8-8 in 2019 and then again in 2020, when the league’s expanded playoff field put them into the wild-card round. Nagy was never able to duplicate his first season, in part because the quarterback he inherited — Mitchell Trubisky, the No. 2 overall pick of the 2017 draft — never made the necessary improvement.

Trubisky departed via free agency last spring, after the Bears traded up to draft quarterback Justin Fields. The Bears were 2-8 in Fields’ 10 starts, and he finished the season ranked last in the league in Total Quarterback Rating (26.0). In four seasons, the Bears were 34-31 under Nagy in the regular season and 0-2 in the playoffs.

Monday’s news has been brewing since the end of November, when a local report emerged that Nagy would be fired after the Bears’ Thanksgiving Day game at the Detroit Lions. Nagy said at the time that he was unaware of his impending firing, but no member of the Bears’ front office or ownership immediately stepped forward to publicly deny the report.

Matt Nagy won the NFL’s Coach of the Year award after his first season in 2018, when he led the Bears to a 12-4 record and reached the playoffs for the first time in eight years. Robin Alam/Icon Sportswire

A day later, owner George McCaskey told players during a team meeting that Nagy would not be fired after the game. The Bears beat the Lions 16-14, but it was their only win amid a 1-8 streak that ran from Weeks 6-15.

Nagy, 43, came to the Bears after eight years working for longtime head coach Andy Reid, including five with the Kansas City Chiefs and three more with the Philadelphia Eagles. Reid promoted him to offensive coordinator in 2017, one year before the Bears hired him.

Pace spent seven seasons with the Bears, hiring two coaches and trading up to draft two quarterbacks during his tenure. His teams made two playoff appearances but did not win a game. The Bears last won a playoff game in 2010 and are 1-3 in the postseason since appearing in Super Bowl XLI after the 2007 season.

Nagy was the second coach Pace hired. Predecessor John Fox spent three seasons with the team as it transitioned away from quarterback Jay Cutler. Pace proved to be an aggressive trader, acquiring pass-rusher Khalil Mack in 2018 in addition to making deals to draft Trubisky and Fields.

But those deals continued a trend of giving up first-round picks that had begun with the Bears’ deal to acquire Cutler in 2009. The organization traded away its first-round picks in 2009, 2010, 2019 and 2020 and do not have one for 2022, either. Of the four first-round picks that Pace did make in his tenure — receiver Kevin White (2015), linebacker Leonard Floyd (2016), Trubisky, linebacker Roquan Smith (2018) and Fields — only Smith has proved a long-term answer.

Pace did have some success in free agency, hitting on receiver Allen Robinson II and defensive tackle Akiem Hicks, among others, and he also drafted impressive receiver Darnell Mooney. But it was not enough to make the Bears annual playoff contenders.

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The Matt Nagy era is officially over. The Chicago Bears parted ways with Nagy on Monday after four years at the helm as the team’s head coach.

The news came down on Monday as questions remain over just how deep the overhaul will be at Halas Hall this offseason. The Bears faltered against the Minnesota Vikings on Sunday, losing 31-17 in the season finale. The loss dropped the club to a 6-11 record on the year. This was the first losing season under Nagy for the Bears. The previous two seasons the team finished 8-8.

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