Bear Digest

Will Bears Regret Not Pursuing Jim Harbaugh?

Analysis: The Bears have to hope they have no regrets over the fact Jim Harbaugh has been hired by the Los Angeles Chargers as head coach.
Gene Chamberlain|
Will Bears Regret Not Pursuing Jim Harbaugh?
Will Bears Regret Not Pursuing Jim Harbaugh?

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Chicago Bears

It might have been Lucille Ball who best summed up the Bears situation now with regards to the coaching situation.

"I'd rather regret the things I've done than regret the things I haven't done," she is credited with saying.

Many Bears fans think they'll be regretting what their team didn't do, after they chose to stick with Matt Eberflus as head coach while Michigan's Jim Harbaugh was available.

The Bears had their chance.

"No, I haven't talked to Jim," GM Ryan Poles said after the season ended. "He's the coach at Michigan."

Now Harbaugh is the coach of the L.A. Chargers.

If anyone thought the Bears could simmply wait until this coaching staff fails in Year 3 and then move in for the hire, they're out of luck.

Harbaugh could actually bring back the old gang from his 49ers days if he wanted, because his former offensive coordinator, Greg Roman, is available and on the same day of Harbaugh's hiring, Vic Fangio and the Dolphins parted ways.

The GM position might have been a major obstacle if the Bears even had a passing thought about hiring Harbaugh at one time.

It has been thought Harbaugh would want his own GM, like any coach in demand would. The Bears already have Poles as GM.

The fact the Chargers do not have a GM yet, after the firing of Tom Telesco, makes for a convenient and cleaner situation in L.A.

Albert Breer of SI.com reported four general manager candidates who have interviewed with the Chargers have some type of tie to Harbaugh. One of those is Bears assistant GM Ian Cunningham, who started working for Baltimore in 2008 when Harbaugh's brother John was hired there as coach and continued there through 2016.

The others reported are Ed Dodds, Joe Hortiz and Brandon Brown.

As for Fangio, the Bears do have an opening but bringing back their popular former defensive coordinator would never have been in the cards because, like with the GM situation, they have someone in place. They don't have a defensive coordinator but they have a head coach whose system is drastically different than Fangio's.

Fangio employed a two-gap approach up front with a 3-4 base front. The Bears now are a one-gap 4-3 front and the two require totally different types of players because of techniques their linemen and linebackers use.

In other words, to have hired Fangio would have meant trashing all the progress made in two seasons on defense under Eberflus and asking Poles to get rid of a number of players they now have on the team to bring in more to fit the 3-4 scheme.  That's another two-year operation after it took all of 2022 just to get rid of the remnants of their old 3-4.

Regardless, the only tie the Bears will have to Harbaugh going forward is they drafted him in the first round in 1987 and he started for them through 1993 at quarterback.

They won't have to face him until 2025 at the earliest, and maybe not until 2027. So they probably won't have to worry about him returning to haunt them, something that seems to happen regularly with this franchise. The Patrick Mahomes/Mitchell Trubisky situation always gets put back in their face whenever they face Kansas City. 

At least they shouldn't have to worry about it for a while unless they're both in the Super Bowl. In that case it's unlikely there would be rergrets about anything by anyone.  

Twitter: BearDigest@BearsOnMaven

 

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Gene Chamberlain
GENE CHAMBERLAIN

Gene Chamberlain has covered the Chicago Bears full time as a beat writer since 1994 and prior to this on a part-time basis for 10 years. He covered the Bears as a beat writer for Suburban Chicago Newspapers, the Daily Southtown, Copley News Service and has been a contributor for the Daily Herald, the Associated Press, Bear Report, CBS Sports.com and The Sporting News. He also has worked a prep sports writer for Tribune Newspapers and Sun-Times newspapers.

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