This was the ultimate debacle for the Bears, one so epically embarrassing that people could lose their jobs over it. Now nearing a calendar year without a victory, they lost 31-28 at home to the previously winless Broncos to hit their lowest point in nearly a decade.
The disaster was worse than anything they’ve done this season — and this season was going disastrously. Now they’re 0-4 and have lost a team-record 14 games in a row.
The captain of this sinking ship is coach Matt Eberflus, who is undoubtedly part of the problem and now sits 3-18 after overseeing the biggest blown lead in Bears history. When he was asked whether he has done his job well this season, he kept his response broad and ambiguous.
‘‘You know, when you’re 0-4, no one’s done the job well enough, right?’’ he said. ‘‘That’s just facts, right? It’s a results business, and we have to do a better job collectively as a group.’’
That’s not an answer.
As a first-time head coach, these results are all Eberflus has. There’s nothing else on his résumé yet but steering the Bears straight to the bottom. That was fine last season, but it’s not at all where they intended to go after restocking the roster during the offseason.
When given one last shot to back away from the brink Sunday, Eberflus made the most questionable in-game decision of his career, and it backfired. With the score tied, 2:52 left and the Broncos down to their last timeout, he bypassed a field goal to go for it on fourth-and-one from the Broncos’ 18-yard line.
He and offensive coordinator Luke Getsy called a read-option play out of the shotgun, and quarterback Justin Fields opted to hand off to Khalil Herbert. Rookie right tackle Darnell Wright missed a block on linebacker Alex Singleton, and it was over. It took the Broncos about a minute to cruise downfield for a 51-yard field goal to go up 31-28.
Just another sad Sunday for the Bears.
‘‘I love the way our offense was running the ball at that time,’’ said Eberflus, whose team averaged 5.5 yards per carry. ‘‘We had a really good chance to seal the deal right there.’’
Several other things would’ve had to go right, however, and for a team on a seemingly endless losing streak, taking the lead on a chip-shot field goal was the safe play.
But even if he insisted on going for it, lining up a running play out of the shotgun, where Herbert got the ball four yards behind the line of scrimmage, was baffling.
If anyone really insists on hearing Eberflus try to explain that call, buckle up. This is going to take awhile.
‘‘Yeah, there’s a lot of plays that you can run there,’’ he acknowledged. ‘‘You can run a bunch of different plays. That’s the play we chose. That’s the play we thought was the best at the time.’’
OK, but why? Why require Herbert to gain five actual yards on a fourth-and-one?
‘‘Just because, you know, it’s about moving people off the ball, as we’ve been doing all day, and we’ve just got to execute in that moment,’’ he said.
Zero clarity.
That play wasn’t the only issue. Before going for it, Eberflus burned a timeout trying to get the Broncos to jump offside. That cost him on the Bears’ final desperate drive. Fields and tight end Cole Kmet were on different wavelengths on the last play, when Fields’ pass was intercepted at the Broncos’ 36-yard line. The Bears committed 10 penalties for 91 yards, including three flags on the drive that ended on the failed fourth-and-one.
Coaching is heavily intertwined in every piece of that.
All the Bears have known under Eberflus has been monotonous misery, and there are organizations that surely would size this up and make a change. The Bears don’t fire coaches during a season, but Eberflus is unmistakably in jeopardy. He’ll have to do a lot if he wants to be here next season.
Although, if you ask him, it’s not going all that badly.
He said he saw ‘‘a lot of good moments in there’’ Sunday and is ‘‘super-excited about those things,’’ even though all of them came against the NFL’s worst defense and were tainted by the Bears’ unraveling. Fields didn’t appear to be celebrating his first 300-yard passing game as he sat silently at his locker, hands folded, head down.
‘‘I certainly can see things moving in the right direction,’’ Eberflus said, delivering a quote from an alternate reality.
The Broncos had given up 70 points last week, by the way. Let’s not treat the Bears dropping 28 on them as a triumph.
The last time the Bears were this bleak was under Marc Trestman, and that’s a dangerous name for Eberflus to see in the same sentence as his.
After going 8-8 in his first season, Trestman started 3-4 in 2014. Then the Bears got drubbed 51-23 by the Patriots. They got a bye week to regroup, then the Packers hammered them 55-14. That was it for Trestman.
Does the current picture look any prettier? The Packers thumped the Bears in the opener, the Bears crumbled late against the Buccaneers and they got absolutely obliterated by the Chiefs. Now this, a historic implosion at home against one of the other worst teams in the league.
The only upside for the Bears is that they’re in line for the top two picks in the 2024 draft because they and the Panthers are the only remaining winless teams. And while Eberflus well could keep them at or near the bottom, he might not last long enough to get the benefits of it.
