The Chicago Bears are an unmitigated mess, with failure invading all levels of their organization.
They have no choice but to start over and fire the whole lot of phonies masquerading as talented football executives and coaches.
They also need to get rid of the uncaring sloth that is Jay Cutler and find a new quarterback. We will address that later, but for now, let’s start at the top.
The Bears are the province of George McCaskey, one of George Halas’ grandsons, and he is now the family member who has been given charge of the team.
For several years after Halas’ death in 1983, Michael McCaskey was in charge of the Bears’ organization. Michael ran the team with an air of arrogance befitting a Harvard professor – he had taught business at the Ivy League school – and was universally despised by Bears fans. He was not well-liked by players or coaches, and when he botched the hiring of Dave McGinnis for the head coaching position in 1999 by saying that the Bears had brought McGinnis back into the fold before an agreement had been reached, he was exposed as a phony/weasel.
He was fired by his mother, Virginia McCaskey.
Halas’ daughter presided over the franchise for several years, and she turned the team over to George in 2011.
McCaskey has never pretended to have his grandfather’s football acumen and instincts, and when the team found itself in need of a new general manager, he turned the responsibility over to a search firm to find the best leader for the Bears.
They came up with Phil Emery, and that’s where the problem lies.
Emery is a well-meaning man, but he has shown that he is a disaster as a general manager. There are no more important decisions than a general manager can make than finding the right head coach and acquiring a franchise quarterback to take over the team.
Emery gave Lovie Smith one more year on the job before he pulled the trigger on the franchise’s third-most successful coach behind Halas and Mike Ditka. That was not a wrong-headed decision, because the team had grown stagnant under Smith, and the Bears needed to do something to upgrade their offense.
Emery went around the country, and then north of the border, to interview coaching candidates. He came up with Marc Trestman, who had been a successful CFL head coach after earning a reputation as a creative offensive coordinator in the NFL.
It seemed that Trestman had the right resume to help take the Bears to the next level, and he was hired after the 2012 season.
There were several things wrong with the Trestman hiring, and the most important thing should have been obvious to Emery during the interview process.
Trestman does not have the inner strength, ego, or fire to lead a top-level, professional football team. He would be an excellent youth-league coach because he is devoted to doing the right thing and fair play, but he lacks the strength to exert his own will, and his players have walked all over him.
Lance Briggs missed the first practice in the first week of the regular season to open a restaurant in California. Brandon Marshall has been flying to New York every week on his off-day to tape Showtime’s Inside the NFL.
Players do what they want, and their priorities have not been about making the Bears a better team or winning football games.
Trestman has been unable to reach them, and his offense has gone downhill this season after a promising start last year. He is an abysmal wreck of a head coach, on a par with the laughable Rich Kotite.
Trestman and Emery told all who would listen that they had an excellent working relationship and were in agreement on nearly all personnel decisions.
The two of them decided to give Cutler a long-term contract last year, even though his performance with the Bears had been rather uneven. They could have franchised him and not made a long-term commitment, but they decided that Cutler’s arm was among the two or three best in the league and they opened up the vault to sign him.
What a disaster. They gave Cutler a seven-year deal that averaged $17.6 million, and while there are outs in the deal for the team, they committed $50 million in guaranteed money to him.
Cutler may have a Dan Marino-rocket for a right arm, but he has none of the other requisites that an elite quarterback needs. He is careless with the ball and he throws interceptions and gives away fumbles with abandon. His accuracy comes and goes. He has no leadership ability, and he does not display any of the emotion that winning quarterbacks have shown for decades.
He has his money, however, and that’s what Cutler wanted. Would he like to win a Super Bowl? I’m sure it would be nice for him, but when it comes to making the effort that goes with becoming an effective leader in the NFL, he apparently could care less.
The Bears cannot win with Cutler. The Bears cannot win with Trestman. The Bears cannot win with Emery.
All three have to go, and McCaskey has a big job to do when the season ends. He has to tear down the Bears by getting rid of all of them and starting over again.
It’s going to cost the Bears a lot of money, but they have no other alternative.
Go ahead, George, rip off that Band-Aid. It will hurt for an instant, but it will start to feel better almost immediately.
