Shape of Bears Coaching Staff Still to Be Decided
Although Bears coach Matt Nagy filled the defensive coordinator position with safeties coach Sean Desai on Friday it doesn't necessarily mean he has four coaching positions still to fill.
It might be three positions to fill, or possibly even two.
The Bears lost defensive line coach Jay Rodgers to the Los Angeles Chargers, while passing game coordinator Dave Ragone and running backs coach Charles London took jobs with the Atlanta Falcons. However, it's not clear they need to fill the passing game coordinator position or the safeties coaching vacancy.
The Bears had no safeties coach per se before Ed Donatell left to join former Bears defensive coordinator Vic Fangio in Denver. They had Roy Anderson on staff as a defensive backs assistant, but no one with the title of safeties coach.
The title and position were created for Desai. The Chicago Tribune had reported at the time the Bears denied a request by Denver to talk to Desai for an open position on Fangio's staff. Desai then became coach assigned to the new role of safeties coach.
The Bears will need to fill the running backs coach position London held, however, they had no passing game coordinator until Nagy hired John DeFilippo as quarterbacks coach and then promoted Ragone from quarterbacks coach to the new role of passing game coordinator.
Without Ragone on staff, how essential is it to have a passing game coordinator?
Their passing attack did improve somewhat in 2020 with a passing game coordinator, quarterbacks coach and offensive coordinator instead of simply the quarterbacks coach and offensive coordinator as they had in 2019.
Quarterbacks had a combined 86.5 passer rating in 2020 and it was 83.9 in 2019, largely because Mitchell Trubisky's passer rating improved from 83.0 to 93.5. Bears quarterbacks threw for 26 touchdown passes in 2020 and had 20 in 2019.
Nagy will need to decide whether improvement resulted from who he had on staff or whether the simple addition of the position itself made the difference.
Obviously whatever the reason, the improvement shown wasn't enough or they'd still be in the playoffs.
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