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Matt Nagy's New Offense Moves on Minus Brad Childress

Bears Senior Offensive Assistant Brad Childress says he won't be back with the team

Another change in the Bears coaching staff has come to light before any type of official team announcement.

Brad Childress has said he will not return as senior offensive assistant. The move comes as the Bears have hired Bill Lazor as new offensive coordinator.  Whether Childress had wanted to become Bears offensive coordinator is uncertain.

Childress told Cleveland Plain Dealer writer May Kay Cabot it's possible he'll go to Cleveland to help protege Kevin Stefanski, who was hired as Browns coach. Childress was in Cleveland as offensive coordinator in 2012. 

There were indications Childress would have joined Stefanski in Cleveland last year if the Browns hired him, but Stefanski finished second to Freddie Kitchens, who was fired after one season as head coach.

Chiildress' role in Chicago was never clearly defined, but he had been described as someone who provided support or ideas to Nagy and worked with several specific aspects of the offense, like hurry-up situations.

In outlining to Cabot what his role could be if he came to Cleveland, Childress described what it was perceived he did for the Bears.

"It's just important to be able to go and shut the door when I was with Andy (Reid) and say 'Coach, are we really going to do this? Are we really going to penalize this guy and not take him on a trip because he walked here in a minute late?' It’s good to have somebody that can do that," Cabot reported Childress as saying.

Whether the Bears will hire someone else to fill this vague function for Nagy now is uncertain. Considering Childress left the Bears once before after coming here, it's possible they won't.

Childress had worked with Nagy over five seasons. He came to Chicago in a consultant role to help put in the offense in 2018, then left before the season to become a head coach in the AAF. Then he quit the AAF before it started and later rejoined the Bears in 2019 in an official capacity as senior offensive assistant.

It's possible the Bears anticipate Lazor will take on some of the duties Childress had on a regular basis, since he isn't going to be involved in play calls.

When the season ended, Nagy had several goals in the offseason and one was breaking down what went wrong and reorganizing it all to make it function better for more scoring.

"You look as some of the things specifically, I look at the red zone, some of the struggles we've had this year in the red zone. That's where you get your points," Nagy said. "I don't want field goals, we don't want field goals. You got to score touchdowns. Part of the process for us as we move through this thing is looking at really specifically all parts of the game, whether it's two-minute mode, whether it's the no-huddle stuff, whether it's the run game, the identity, then the red zone.

"Everything is on the table for us. It's about adaptation, it's about figuring out how to get to that point, not being satisfied. I think that's what we'll do."

It would appear the process is continuing.

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