Matt Nagy is certainly to blame for the Bears’ plunge since 2018, and specifically the sickening depth they’ve dropped to this season, but it’s not 100% his fault.
Nagy has been asked repeatedly over the last few months about what specifically has gone wrong or what has been missing amid the decline, and he has filibustered every time. The most recent inquiry was Monday, after the team fell to 4-10 because of another weak offensive performance, and Nagy said he’d have time after the season to sort all that out.
Tons of time, really.
Nagy absolutely should’ve done better, and his firing will be more than justified. And once they dismiss him, he almost certainly won’t be sticking around to give the media a debriefing on the debacle. Even then, he’d probably take full responsibility.
But if he was willing to really get into it, he’d probably remind everyone — as the Bears have said constantly — that this was a collaboration of errors. General manager Ryan Pace’s fingerprints are all over this disaster.
It starts with the quarterbacks, where both of them have been wrong at almost every turn.
They both misjudged Mitch Trubisky’s ability, first Pace by bypassing greater talents to draft him No. 2 overall and by Nagy mistakenly thinking the Bears had a franchise quarterback in place when he took the job.
Their next joint venture was almost as bad. After finally accepting that Trubisky wasn’t the guy, they teamed up to trade a fourth-round pick for Nick Foles and commit to a three-year contract for him.
It didn’t take long to see that Nagy and Foles had trouble getting on the same page.
“I don’t know what that means by ‘not on the same page,'” Nagy said. “Nick’s been great this whole time.”
Here’s a quick refresher for anyone else feeling similarly forgetful:
-Nagy got upset with Foles over multiple delay-of-game penalties last season, including one coming out of a timeout and another that prompted him to rip Foles in the post-game press conference for taking too long to read plays off his wristband.
-Foles told the “Monday Night Football” broadcast crew that Nagy didn’t realize some plays were doomed from the moment he called them. He benched Foles later that season in favor of going back to Trubisky.
-In his lone media appearance of this season, Foles took the mic in August and basically begged the Colts to trade for him because coach Frank Reich “understands me as a player; He understands me as a person.”
And that was Nagy and Pace’s solution to the biggest problem on the roster.
From there, they pivoted to Andy Dalton and Justin Fields. Nagy was tasked with grooming Fields in the best interest of the franchise’s future, but knew he needed to win now to save his job and trusted Dalton. That played out haphazardly, to no one’s surprise.
Nagy and Pace haven’t had many good answers for the other deficiencies that have sunk the Bears, either.
The offensive line has been an ongoing concern, some of the offensive skill players like Anthony Miller have been problematic and the defense has steadily slid to the point where no one trusts it anymore.
Those failures are as much on Pace as anyone. That’s why chairman George McCaskey will have no credible explanation for separating the fates of Nagy and Pace. One of the reasons he gave for retaining them in January was “how well they collaborate.”
As Nagy so oddly-yet-profoundly described the offense’s futility in mid-November, “It’s no one’s fault other than everybody’s.” That applies broadly here. Nagy has done a dreadful job with his part of the project, but there’s much more to it.
