Bears Cycle of Defeat and Repeat

The Bears already have clinched a losing record and barring some sort of supernatural intervention they will watch the playoffs this year.

The McCaskey ownership family also seem poised to clinch the first management mistake of the offseason. In fact, they may have already done it.

Their next move seems obvious, and it's changing coaches. The fate of GM Ryan Pace would appear less certain and a report from the Chicago Tribune suggests they could alter their management structure to include a football czar above the GM, another complication in determining who will be coach and who presides over the next draft.

On Wednesday, owners passed a resolution saying interviews for vacant head coaching positions in the NFL can be held in the final two weeks of the regular season if permission is granted from the assistant coaches' current teams.

Teams with interim head coaches can send out requests to other teams for interviews beginning on the Tuesday after Christmas.

So right now the Jacksonville Jaguars and Las Vegas Raiders qualify as teams who can do this, after the firing of Urban Meyer and earlier resignation by Jon Gruden.

With two teams already in the mix, if Bears board chairman George McCaskey and team CEO Ted Phillips actually do plan to make a coaching change then the time to begin the process is not after the season when there is even more competition for possible head coaches, or after the Raiders and Jaguars have even already hired the best candidates.

The time to do this firing and even a possible GM firing is as soon as possible.

In other words, they need to dismiss coach Matt Nagy by Dec. 27 in order to be interviewing candidates over the season's final two weeks so they can get a jump on the entire process. That is, this is the case if they even plan on a coaching change.

The move by the NFL to allow these interviews shouldn't have taken anyone by surprise. Everyone knew this was coming for several weeks.

However, as is usually the case with Bears ownership, the entire decision-making process moves slowly.

All of this should have been set in motion already, just like the Raiders and Jaguars have done.

They also should have cleared up Pace's status by now because: If Pace is being retained with someone else as grand poobah of football, then he obviously would need to talk to candidates in the last two weeks of the season to hire the new coach.

If Pace is being retained with someone else as grand poobah of football, then he obviously would need to talk to candidates in the last two weeks of the season to hire the new coach.

It seems unlikely after Pace has engineered a trade to draft Justin Fields and also made the trade for Khalil Mack, but if Pace also is being fired then the Bears need to already have someone in place to take his place in order to hire the coach as quickly as possible. That means they still have to hire a head of football, a GM and then a coach, if the Tribune story describing possible change of management structure is true. And they need to do it all after everyone else has been picking over the best candidates. This is a nightmare scenario because they'll be so far behind in the process.

If Pace is being kicked upstairs to take the football czar role, and a new GM is going to hire the head coach and draft players, then they already needed the new GM in order to interview coaches. There is another possibility, and that is ownership plans to let Pace make the hire, then fire him, or that they plan to let him make the coaching hire and draft players, then fire him. Neither of these make sense, but it wouldn't be the first time they did this. They let Mark Hatley draft players in 2001 and then shortly thereafter fired him as they went about hiring general manger Jerry Angelo. How do you put someone in charge of selecting your players that you consider not worthy of being in the organization a week or so later?

Even if those were potential options, the Bears would be behind in the process because they still have the same head coach.

Once again Bears ownership is squandering time with indecision and ineffective management.

They are never sharp and on the cutting edge. Instead, they wait and look around like a quarterback who can't read defenses, then they get blindsided as they're about to throw.

The end result can only be something similar to what they've had occur at Halas Hall now for decades. The cycle keeps repeating itself.

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