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Matt Eberflus is going to be better than Matt Nagy, who was going to be better than John Fox, who sure as hell wasn’t going to be as bad as Marc Trestman, who was going to be better than Lovie Smith, who was going to be better than Dick Jauron and was, just not better enough.

Jauron was going to be better than Dave Wannstedt, who was going to attempt to fill Mike Ditka’s roller skates but couldn’t.

Feel better now about the Bears’ coaching situation? I didn’t think so. But look at it this way: My first sentence could have been: “Justin Fields is going to be better than Andy Dalton, who was going to be better than Nick Foles, who was brought in to push Mitch Trubisky, who . . . .” That’s a lot of pain I saved you right there.

A new Bears season is upon us, this one full of new faces, the most prominent being Eberflus and his locked jaw. The new coach has vowed to bring toughness to his team, which is good because football tends to lean toward violence, bloodshed and general mayhem. But there’s also a new general manager, Ryan Poles, who is going to be better than Ryan Pace, who sure as hell wasn’t going to be as bad as Phil Emery, who . . . OK, I’ll stop.

But I think you Bears fans get the picture. The franchise, the one you’ve given your heart to, hasn’t gotten it right with coaches and personnel men since Ditka and the late Jim Finks, whose name still elicits mass genuflection across Chicago. If the idea is a Super Bowl title, then it has been forever (1985) since the Bears have found the kind of leaders capable of delivering a championship.

It’s not fair to mention Eberflus-Poles in the same breath as Ditka-Finks, but it’s difficult to find a stratum in which to place them. We know so little about the two men, which makes sense: This is their first rodeo as coach and general manager. Is there gold in there? Or are they just a couple of rocks that will serve as door stops until team chairman George McCaskey realizes two or three years too late that he has made another mistake?

The Bears were trying to win last season and finished 6-11. This is going to be a rebuilding year, which means that your pain will come with cushioning. I’m not sure you’ll understand the distinction when the Bills are beating the Bears’ heads in on Dec. 24.

So, how to judge the new coach and the new general manager? For Eberflus and his staff, the obvious goal this season will be progress from Fields, whose obvious goal is to stay healthy behind a very shaky offensive line in his second year in the league. For Poles, the obvious goal will be very few victories and high picks in next year’s draft, though you won’t hear him say that. The really, really obvious goal will be linemen who can actually block for Fields in the coming years, receivers who can actually catch passes from Fields and a definitive answer on whether Fields is as remotely good as the massive hype says he is.

If he is, Bears fans can start thinking about a Super Bowl rather than fantasizing about one and a Mega Millions victory.

If he isn’t, Poles can start looking for the next quarterback who is sure to be better than the previous one, an ongoing Bears exercise that is the longest tease in recorded human history.

So, yes, progress. Progress from Fields this season, but not too much progress from everyone else so as to win too many games. It’s hard to get a slogan out of that. Get Better, But Not So Much That You Can Tell in the Standings?

A victory for Eberflus this season will be widespread respect, which sounds overly broad and definitely unmeasurable, so perhaps there’s a better way to put it: If the Bears don’t look like a clown show in 2022, it’ll be a win for the coach. That’s a reflection on Nagy, who went from being embraced for his offensive “genius” and daring early in his career in Chicago to being excoriated for failing remedial offensive play-calling. To be loved, all Eberflus and offensive coordinator Luke Getsy have to do in 2022 is do the logical thing. Forget about “Be You,” Nagy’s exhortation to his players. Just “Be Smart.”

It’s not much to ask. Low expectations are all the rage. Maybe that’s why this season feels strange before it even begins. Eberflus won’t have much to work with, and Poles will be in a holding pattern before he can do anything of real substance. They’re more likely to get an incomplete than a letter grade when the schedule runs out. If you’re looking for more uncertainty, there’s the Bears’ stadium situation. The team might move to Arlington Heights in the coming years. It might play in an improved Soldier Field, which could include a dome.

The Bears are an agnostic’s dream. Will Eberflus succeed? I don’t know. What does Poles’ personnel acumen look like? I don’t know. Are Fields and quarterbacking a match? I don’t know.

The best the 2022 season will be able to offer are partial answers. There’s too much work to be done, and much of that work will be done next year and the year after that.

Weird? Well, weird is what you’re getting. A big bowl of it. We’re used to immediacy with the NFL. This week’s game means everything, until next week’s game means more. But a rebuild, so popular in Major League Baseball and the NBA, is relatively new in the NFL. How are Bears fans supposed to react to what is, in effect, purposeful losing? With skepticism and cynicism. With some humor thrown in to account for the inevitable slapstick that comes with having below-average players. With one eye on the future and one eye on the past.

Will Eberflus be a good coach? He has to be better than Abe Gibron, who was supposed to be better than Jim Dooley, who . . .

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At 36, Ryan Poles is a first-time general manager and the second youngest general manager in the NFL. And he looked the part of green rookie at the opening press conference prior to the start of Bears training camp –a little nervous, unsure and hardly in command of the room like the GM often is.

And never more so than when it came to the touchy subject of Roquan Smith, the Bears’ All-Pro linebacker who was expected to hold out of training camp practices because of a contract impasse.

Smith is arguably the team’s best player, and at 25 is considered the cornerstone of the rebuild under Poles and head coach Matt Eberflus. Most general managers know better than to negotiate in the media, but the veteran GMs know how to address a hot-button issue without revealing any details — the Cubs’ Theo Epstein and Jed Hoyer and White Sox GM Rick Hahn do it all the time.

It’s a finesse part of a public job that Poles had no interest in.

“I know I’m going to get a lot of question [about Roquan] and I get it,” Poles said. “[But] I’m just not gonna talk about contracts and all that. I just want to make sure we addressed it in terms of my feelings for him — nothing changes.”

And sure enough, those questions that were sure to come elicited no new information.

“Has Roquan communicated his intentions for training camp?”

“Again, I’m not gonna get into that situation at this time,” he said.

Poles was so careful about talking about Smith, he wouldn’t even acknowledge whether Smith had an agent after representing himself in offseason negotiations.

“Umm, uhhh, you’ll have to –yeah, I’m not gonna talk about that,” Poles said.

Fast forward two weeks later and Smith’s “hold-in” — which had been a non-issue with Roquan reporting to camp, attending practices but not participating –blew up significantly when Smith announced via social media that he was asking for a trade and accused the Bears of failing to “negotiate in bad faith.”

This time, Poles stepped up. Following the Bears’ Family Fest practice at Soldier Field, Poles addressed the Roquan situation at a post-practice press conference and provided a little more substance in answering questions

“I thought we’d be in a better situation, to be completely honest with you,” Poles said. ” I’ve always believed and always will that we take care of our homegrown talent. We pay them. We take care of them and we take everyone for what they’ve done and what they can become in the future.”

Poles even divulged at least a hint of what the Bears were offering — indirectly responding to the charge that the Bears were not negotiating in good faith.

“We’ve showed respect from a very early time-frame and … there’s record-setting pieces of this contract that I thought was going to show him the respect that he deserves –and obviously that hasn’t been the case.”

That’s a huge difference from the Ryan Poles everybody saw the day camp opened. He went from looking like a rookie doing this job for the first time to a veteran GM who’s done this before.

And that’s what it’s going to take for Poles to succeed at Halas Hall, where three general managers before him have been fired in the last 10 years –he’s going to have to grow into the job.

Already, Poles has been tested in his new job. A deal to sign defensive tackle Larry Ogunjobi — Poles’ biggest free agent target at the most critical position in his defense — fell through when Ogunjobi could not pass his physical. Poles had not been told of a complication following Ogunjobi’s offseason foot surgery.

Three players were arrested in the offseason — wide receivers Byron Pringle and David Moore and linebacker Matt Adams. All-Pro defensive end Robert Quinn skipped the mandatory veteran mini-camp in June. And then Roquan Smith held out.

“You’ve got to take one thing at a time,” Poles said. “That’s part of this job, there’s something new –literally every single day there’s something thrown at you with your team [and] you’ve got to talk through things. And you want to do what’s best for the Bears.

“I feel like it’s going well. There’s going to be more things on the way and we’re just going to keep chipping away and working through them.”

When Poles was hired in January to replace Pace, his first decision raised some eyebrows — hiring first-time head coach Matt Eberflus as his head coach less than 48 hours after getting the job. It seemed a little too convenient –Eberflus had already been interviewed by the Bears’ searching committee for the coaching job before Poles was hired.

Poles pushed back against the notion that he was hiring ownership’s candidate and not his own. Would he have preferred to do a more expansive search on his own?

“I did have that opportunity. I found him,” Poles said, pointing toward Eberflus on the dais at the George “Mugs” Halas Auditorium in January.

Poles’ intuition about people will be a huge key to his success. And in fact, the hiring of Eberflus is also an indication that Poles is willing to go against the grain.

He hired a defensive coach for a team when other teams with quarterbacks like Justin Fields are hiring quarterback whisperers (as Pace did with Matt Nagy for Mitch Trubisky). And one reason he did that was because Eberflus not only had a plan to hire Luke Getsy as offensive coordinator, but also was prepared to hire his replacement if Getsy leaves to take a head coaching job. They both were thinking long term.

“[His plan] made sense to sustain success for a long period of time,” Poles said when asked what impressed him about Eberflus. “It wasn’t short-sighted, where we have success –[as] we saw with Atlanta and [Mike] Shanahan –and then it crashes. What’s the progression of it? He had that laid out.”

And with a gaping hole at wide receiver in a wide receiver-heavy draft — and a need on the offensive line –Poles instead used his first two draft picks on defensive players, both in the second round. He took Washington cornerback Kyler Gordon with the 39th overall pick and Penn State safety Jaquan Brisker with the 48th pick.

And while the Bears look very needy on offense in training camp, Gordon and Brisker already look like they were the best players available. Both are in line to be Week 1 starters, with star potential. More importantly at this point, both players look like good fits for Eberflus’ defense — physical, aggressive and athletic.

That’s the part that goes beyond the normal honeymoon and general manager and his coach usually have.

“The communication’s been great,” Eberflus said when asked how his relationship with Poles has grown. “What the six or seven months now has proven to me is that we’re in line with what we want the team to look like. You can see that. We want an athletic, fast, tough football team. And that’s what we’re striving to get every day.”

As a 36-year-old general manager — less than five years older than defensive end Robert Quinn –Poles often dresses and looks more like a coach than a GM and is particularly engaged with the players and staff.

“He’s a hands-on GM,” Eberflus said. “He’s in the building, working with the players, talking to the guys, encouraging them throughout the day. And in practice, he’s observing [and] might come in the middle sometimes and I’ll be talking to him about what plays we’re running. He’s been great.”

Poles became a popular general manager candidate in NFL circles because of his 13 years with the Chiefs when they went from a 2-14 doormat the year before he was hired to Super Bowl champions. He turned down an interviewHe was hired by Scott Pioli, retained by John Dorsey and retained again by Brett Veach.

He arrived with glowing endorsements from all of his bosses, but also knows what he doesn’t know. He hired Ian Cunningham as assistant general manager — the first time the Bears have had an assistant GM.

“I thought it was more important to bring someone else in with more experience from a different place,” Poles said. “With Ian’s background with the Ravens and the Eagles, he’s seen a lot from Howie Roseman and Ozzie Newsome. To add that experience is critical.”

While Poles’ inexperience makes for some challenges in his first year as a general manager, his youth can be a boon. He has a healthy appreciation for the importance of maintaining mental health in today’s professional athletes. In fact, he said he still sees a sports psychologist on a monthly basis.

He made a bold move to address that with his players. He replaced LaMar “Soup” Campbell, a popular director of player engagement, with Mike Wiley, Jr., as director of player development and mental skills.

“One thing I noticed is … the pressures that this game puts on you,” Poles said. “There’s a mental piece to this that’s absolutely critical, and I wanted someone that could come in and be educated through their education — through school — on how to work with players to get their mind-set the right way.

“How do you clear your mind? How do you go to the next step and kind of push away a bad game, a bad practice or things that are wearing on you mentally? How can I overcome that? I just wanted to go in a different direction on the support that we’re giving our players in that aspect of it.”

Poles is providing Halas Hall with 21st-century leadership it desperately needs. Ultimately, he will need to upgrade the roster. And, of course, get the quarterback right — which his predecessors have failed to do. A lot depends on Poles being able to mold Halas Hall into his vision instead of the other way around. His biggest job is to grow into the job, and make it his own.

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The world spins faster for quarterbacks, and the ones who have the almost superhuman ability to slow it down are the ones who conquer and endure.

That’s the challenge Justin Fields faces this season with the Bears: bending time in his favor.

Quarterbacks usually have less than three seconds after the snap to decipher the many moving parts on the field and about three seasons to prove their franchises should bet their future on them. The best ones read defenses so quickly that time becomes irrelevant, and they often unleash so much firepower so early in their careers that it renders moot any conversation about their place in the long-term plan.

For Fields, however, the clock is ticking quicker.

In a literal sense, he absolutely can’t count on getting three seconds to throw. In his rookie season, the Bears gave him an average of 2.4 seconds and allowed him to be pressured more often than all but four quarterbacks.

And in the big picture? The people who brought him in got fired. So if general manager Ryan Poles isn’t convinced by the end of this season, he probably will have a high draft pick with which to choose his own quarterback.

Fields wants to operate above the pressure. He knows his rookie season wasn’t good — ”For sure,” he said — and a variety of factors made evaluating him cloudy, to use Poles’ word. But he’ll go at his own pace, regardless of the Bears’ urgency to make a decision abouthim.

”I’m not worried about their timetable,” he said, gesturing toward the front office upstairs as he sat in a conference room at Halas Hall. ”I’m worried about my timetable.

”Just continually get better. The more you work yourself, the more you’re gonna be good at it and you’re gonna be better. I’m not worried about their timetable. Whatever happens, happens. I know I’ve got God with me, so I’m good with whatever.”

That’s a healthy state of mind, but it doesn’t change the Bears’ reality. They need to know by the end of this season whether Fields can carry them and fulfill Poles’ vow to ”take the [NFC] North and never give it back.”

That trek is long and treacherous, and it inevitably goes through the Packers. And it begins in the Bears’ season opener Sunday against the 49ers.

Chaos and clouds

The worst thing that could happen for the Bears this season would be to get to the end of it and still not have a verdict on Fields. He must stay healthy, the supporting cast must prove viable and the offense must be productive.

None of that happened last season amid the mismatched puzzle pieces of then-GM Ryan Pace’s personnel, then-coach Matt Nagy’s offense and Fields’ skills.

Adding to the dysfunction, the choices Pace and Nagy made to try to save their jobs weren’t always aligned with what was best for Fields and a future they wouldn’t be part of. That’s why the Bears desperately promised Andy Dalton the starting job so he would sign with them, then hatched a plan to keep Fields on the bench all season when they drafted him a month later.

”I wasn’t really fazed by that,” Fields told the Sun-Times. ”I knew that wasn’t gonna [last] the whole year. I just knew if I worked hard, then I would put myself in a good position to be on the field.”

He took over when Dalton hurt his knee in Week 2 and was made the permanent starter two weeks later. His experience was still limited, however. Between injuries and catching the coronavirus, he started 10 games and took only 57% of the snaps.

Fields won’t bash anyone — ”I love coach Nagy,” he said — but hitting the reset button under coach Matt Eberflus, offensive coordinator Luke Getsy and quarterbacks coach Andrew Janocko was exactly what he needed. The vibe at Halas Hall feels infinitely better, though Fields declined to get into specifics about what Eberflus fixed after Nagy’s exit.

”It’s just the way that coach Eberflus and the new staff go about everything — energetic, confident,” Fields said. ”When you have a confident head coach, the culture is gonna push you hard.

”Coach Nagy is a great guy and stuff like that, but this staff we have here now has been great so far — their attitude toward things, they have a plan, they know what they want to do. [We have] a confident head coach and a confident staff overall and a staff that wants you to be you.”

Nagy’s motto, of course, is, ”Be you,” but that often felt empty. He seemed more intent on turning Fields — and Mitch Trubisky, for that matter — into Alex Smith than letting him be him.

Fields said he felt ”a little bit robotic” trying to fit into a quarterback room with veterans Dalton and Nick Foles. And while he defended Nagy by saying, ”I don’t feel like his offense held me back,” it obviously did.

Nagy basically admitted that when he surrendered play-calling within days of Fields’ disastrous starting debut against the Browns. Defensive end Myles Garrett said shutting down Nagy’s scheme ”came easily,” and Nagy made no meaningful adjustments as Fields got sacked nine times while completing only 6 of 20 passes. The Bears staggered to 47 yards of net offense, their worst total in 40 years.

That day is a snapshot of why it’s difficult to assess Fields’ rookie season. He took ownership of a campaign that ended with him completing 58.9% of his passes (32nd among the 33 quarterbacks who threw at least 200 times), throwing only seven touchdown passes (32nd) and flinging 10 interceptions (second-worst by percentage) on his way to a 73.2 passer rating (30th). He also had the fourth-most fumbles in the NFL with 12 in 12 games.

Fields, not Nagy, threw every one of those passes and said he spent extensive time examining his errors. But his statistics paint an incomplete picture.

It’s necessary to weigh the effects of Nagy sticking him on second string all offseason, playing behind an offensive line that widely was deemed one of the NFL’s flimsiest and working in an offense that scored the seventh-fewest points in the two seasons before the Bears drafted him.

”It does cloud all of that,” Poles told the Sun-Times shortly after taking the job.

”I want to see what ceiling [Fields] has. . . . It’d be really cool if he ends up being a real dude. We can win some championships that way. We look for flashes of him putting it together. . . . There’s something there. If we can get him to repeat that over and over and put him in a position where he’s comfortable, we might have something.”

The first step was sweeping out everything that was malfunctioning around him. The next is outfitting him with everything he needs. And while Poles thinks he has done that with the coaching staff and revamped personnel, it takes some faith to believe it.

The final one is for Fields to take all that and do something with it. And, again, time is a concern. So even if the circumstances still aren’t perfect, he has to rise above the roster flaws.

Chasing Rodgers

The prelude to this season makes a lot more sense for Fields than it did a year ago. The awkwardness of waiting behind Dalton and being thrown into games sporadically is gone, and it has been replaced by a plan tailored to his abilities.

Last season, Fields had to adapt to an offense that Nagy stubbornly promised was finally ready to click in Year 4. This time, it’s a collaboration.

”Luke tries to [institute] some rules, but at the end of the day you have to feel it out; you can’t overthink on the field,” Fields said. ”That’s my biggest mindset change from last year to this year: Just get the job done, no matter how you do it. They really only care about results.

”It’s just a different mindset. [I’m] not worrying about, ‘If I make a mistake, will I get taken out?’ It feels way better, for sure.”

Fields is also far more comfortable and empowered now that he’s the starter and fully established as a team leader. The dynamic created by Pace and Nagy’s commitment to Dalton impeded that.

”They dealt with it the best they could, but when you put yourself in that tough spot — I don’t know,” Fields said. ”You promise a guy something, then something happens. But I guess that’s the business.

”Now I’m the guy, so of course we’re gonna build the offense around me, around our players, around [running back David Montgomery], around the stuff that we do well.”

There’s an element of this process that might make Bears fans queasy, by the way, but they begrudgingly will concede it’s prudent. Getsy and Fields have been stealing as much as they can from Packers star Aaron Rodgers. If you want to ”take the North,” start by taking as much as you can from the king of it.

”I watched a bunch of Green Bay film this offseason,” Fields said.

As of now, Fields is merely another name on the list of 16 starting quarterbacks the Bears have used since Rodgers took over the Packers in 2008. He’s trying to go from footnote to foe.

He is not the same player Rodgers is and doesn’t aim to be, but there are elements he aspires to adopt. Rodgers knows opposing defenses better than the defenders themselves — ”You can definitely tell when he knows what you’re in,” Bears cornerback Jaylon Johnson said — and plays with unparalleled efficiency by happily taking the easiest play he sees. And he almost never turns the ball over.

”He’s the best quarterback in the NFL,” Fields said. ”I like how he plays. That’s just me being real.”

That’s the standard Fields is eyeing. He sees Rodgers as someone to chase rather than hate.

”I want to beat the Packers this year, but [people] want me to dislike him? For what?” said Fields, who noted that Rodgers gave him meaningful advice after their game in December at Lambeau Field. ”There’s no reason for me. He’s a great quarterback. He plays the game very efficiently, for sure.”

He added: ”That’s all A-Rod does: [He dumps] it off to the back in the flat. Boom, they break tackles and get 10 yards off of a two-yard throw. That helps you out.”

That thinking is essential to Getsy’s offense. He wants to take the yards that are begging to be taken. He has installed an outside zone running scheme, has no reservations about maximizing Fields’ mobility by getting him out of the pocket and has shifted Fields’ perspective from forcing big plays to taking the freebies.

”My mindset last year was [that] even if plays aren’t there, I still have to try to make a play,” Fields said. ”This year it’s more, ‘Let’s set ourselves up.’ If it’s second-and-eight, we don’t have to get the first down. We just have to get five yards to make it third-and-three and make it manageable.

”I have that mindset of just keeping the ball safe and giving ourselves a chance — holding on to the ball, that’s the biggest thing — and just getting little gains. Boom, completion. Boom, completion. Moving on.”

Sounds a lot like Rodgers. And as long as we’re not talking about drinking psychedelics or shaky medical advice, that’s a good thing.

Finding balance

There are no days off for Fields, only nights off.

If there’s no practice for the Bears the next day, he’ll allow himself a relaxing evening of playing video games. But he’s using the supposed day off to prepare for what’s next. He’ll get a massage in the morning, have physical therapy right after lunch and spend much of his day studying film.

When he doesn’t have a night off, Fields gets home from Halas Hall around 7 p.m., watches film from practice and scouting clips of the upcoming defense and studies plays for two-minute drills and other specific situations. That leaves him about 45 minutes to read — recent selections include ”The Four Agreements” and ”The Alchemist” — before falling asleep and getting up at 6 a.m. to do it all over again.

Even the Bears think that’s a little over the top, Fields said, and they’ve been working to help him establish a little more balance going into this season.

”Sometimes when you overwork yourself — you’re so consumed by football, football, football — you can have so much stuff in your mind that you can’t think clearly,” he said. ”If I study a crazy amount, then I’m thinking about every little detail when I’m in the game instead of going out there . . . and playing free and just reacting to everything.

”Once you find that healthy balance . . . your headspace is better. And when your headspace is better, of course, your mental health is way better and . . . really, you can go out there and just play how you play.”

That’s what everyone is waiting for. They want to see Fields doing the things that made him dominant at Ohio State and vaulted him to No. 11 in the draft. Whether he says it publicly or not, there were a lot of obstacles to that last season. He couldn’t truly play how he plays.

Enough of those hindrances have been removed, however, for Fields to show what he can do. The Bears are in a major rebuild and unlikely to pile up victories. But regardless of how the season goes overall, Fields needs to give them irrefutable proof he’s their answer.

Because even though this is only his second season, he’s already short on time.

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