The Message Lions Firings Carry for the Bears
The Detroit Lions fired head coach Matt Patricia and GM Bob Quinn in one early swoop, and this can have a profound impact on the Bears.
The consipracy theorists and social media dog pilers will say this shows the Bears should do the same with their coach and GM because the Lions had the fortitude to make such a move after only two seasons and 11 games of the Patricia regime. He had coached just one more game than Matt Nagy.
Quinn didn't get it done and began as GM with the 2016 season. He fired Jim Caldwell after Caldwell made the playoffs in 2016 and was 9-7 in 2017 without making the playoffs. Then brought in Patricia as part of the New England Patriots connection and they flopped. So Quinn deserved to go as much as Patricia.
However, this says nothing about Ryan Pace. The Bears won the division two years ago with a team Pace built. Quinn's only playoff year was with a team built before he arrived.
Pace's team hasn't fallen below .500 yet since winning the division. Now, it's likely to happen this week because the chances of beating Green Bay after the Packers lost is low and of doing it with the team the Bears will put out there Sunday is even lower.
This isn't to say Pace doesn't deserve to be fired. Moves like signing Robert Quinn to a big contract and bringing in Nick Foles for a draft pick look bad now, but he also has had successes.
That's an entirely different set of circumstances and maybe one still to be decided. Instead, his fate has no tie whatsoever to logic behind the firing of Quinn. He didn't dismantle a successful team and replace it with trash.
As for Patricia, Nagy has never had a losing season and has had a quarterback nowhere near as effective as Matthew Stafford can be.
Nagy has never lost to the Lions, either, and it took a complete offensive collapse for him to lose to the Minnesota Vikings for the first time.
It's obvious Patricia had lost this team and he probably wasn't a good coaching candidate for any team.
Nagy never has lost his team. They always fight for him, and it's when you lose the team that you have problems.
The Lions lost in a blowout to the Vikings, then they got shut out by the struggling Carolina Panthers, who used an XFL quarterback. Finally, they lost a blowout on their home field to another struggling team on Thanksgiving Day. That day is supposed to be the day the Lions always feast. It's their birthright, but they lost all three of Patricia's games then, the first two to the Bears.
There is a downside to this for the Bears and it's that they have to play the Lions next week and face interim coach Darrell Bevell.
Detroit will have a full minibye weekend to work on the Bears game plan, and the worst thing for the Bears is the Lions have actually hired a competent coach.
Actually, if they wanted to forget the coaching pursuit after the season, Bevell would be a great hire offensively.
Bevell has always improved an offense after becoming offensive coordinator. He got the Vikings job in 2006 under Brad Childress and they were 26th in scoring and 23rd in yardage the first year. Each of the next three years they improved until they were second in scoring and fifth on offense in 2009 before they got fired when it all fell apart in 2010.
With the Seahawks, he did the same thing, improving each of the first four seasons, including the Super Bowl-winning year of 2013. They were fourth in yardage and scoring in 2014 when they lost the Super Bowl. Then it dropped off to middle of the pack for two years and he was fired.
With the Lions, he improved them last year and this year they stagnated amid injuries and lack of talent but are still better than the Bears offense at 22nd in scoring and yardage.
So the impact of this move on the Bears is that they could very well be 5-6 next week and facing a more formidable opponent at Soldier Field.
And if they lost, then the talk of Matt Nagy and Ryan Pace losing their jobs would be extremely legitimate.
Twitter: BearDigest@BearsOnMaven
