Monday night’s matchup of the Bears and Patriots gives us an example of the different ways NFL teams march ahead. Or tread water. Or move backward.
Patriots coach Bill Belichick, you probably have heard, is tied for the second-most wins in NFL history with a certain man named George Halas.
Each has 324 wins, regular season and playoffs combined. Belichick needs only 24 more to pass No. 1 Don Shula (347 wins) for first all time.
Maybe we should note right off that there are many more regular-season and playoff games available these days — Halas often coached 11-game seasons, some that included NFL championships; Belichick has coached 18- or 19-game seasons en route to titles.
But no matter. It’s all relative. There were eight NFL teams during some of Halas’ years; now there are 32.
The point here, anyway, is that Belichick is in his 28th year of head-coaching, the last 23 with the Patriots. He is by far the longest-tenured active NFL head coach, both total and with the same team. Following him as head coach of the same team are the Steelers’ Mike Tomlin (16), the Ravens’ John Harbaugh (15), the Seahawks’ Pete Carroll (12) and the Chiefs’ Andy Reid (10).
That’s a pretty quality group there.
And it’s not an accident they’ve been in one place for a while. Either their longevity occurred because they were such good coaches or they were given lengthy deals that allowed them to be good.
It almost doesn’t matter which it was, because hiring and firing coaches in rapid succession almost guarantees a team will lurch about, never getting anywhere for long, always retreating to the middle or dropping into the murk.
Hello, Bears.
They are led into this Monday night game by first-year coach Matt Eberflus, who hasn’t established himself as much of anything. You could say he hasn’t had enough time or has little player talent or has been unlucky or is finding his footing or whatever else might have led to a 2-4 record.
And it all might be true.
But we’ll never know — if Eberflus gets dumped in a season or two.
Since Belichick has been with the Patriots, winning six Super Bowls, the Bears have had six head coaches.
Maybe they were all average-to-bad coaches. But then why were they hired in the first place?
And yet the NFL coaching hired-to-be-fired carousel continues whirling about, unimpeded by the lessons of consistency. Indeed, there are 11 coaches in their first year with a new team. There are five more who are in their second year. And most of the rest were hired since 2017.
Consistency?
Hardly. And how does a quarterback and a defense and a whole offense settle if the head man keeps changing?
We can look at Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers and wonder why he’s struggling this season with a sub-.500 team. Then consider he is dealing with a new offensive coordinator, a new quarterbacks coach, and he lost his No. 1 receiver Davante Adams to a five-year, $140 million contract with the Raiders.
All of a sudden, it makes sense. Without consistency, nobody can flourish.
Belichick just keeps plowing ahead. He looks and sounds like the biggest grump since the Grinch. But his strange monotone, reticence and lack of people-pleasing skills hide a genius calculator of football schemes and subtleties.
He even waxed almost cheerful when talking about the man he’s tied with, Papa Bear Halas, who knew Bill’s dad, who played a year with the Lions.
“Coach Halas was a friend of my dad’s,’’ he said recently. ‘‘We would go to the locker room after the game. They were always very gracious and generous and let me hang around.’’
One marvels at the thought of a little blank-faced Belichick, wondering if the football computer was already whirring in that juvenile brain.
The problem for the Bears seems to be quarterback Justin Fields. But all the quarterbacks picked high up in the 2021 draft with Fields — Trevor Lawrence, Zach Wilson, Trey Lance, Mac Jones — have struggled this year for some reason or other. Unsung Patriots backup Bailey Zappe has done pretty well. And maybe that’s the Belichick effect.
And maybe lasting a long time is more important than anything that happens in football these days.
