When the NFL released its all-22 footage of Sunday’s game between the Washington Commanders and the Chicago Bears, the video of cornerback Tyrique Stevenson taunting the opposing fan base appeared even more jaw-dropping. The 2023 second-round pick did not turn away from the crowd until all of the Commanders’ receivers were at the 30-yard line. He did not break toward those receivers or move from a vacant far corner of the field until all of the Commanders’ receivers were at the 15-yard line.
My personal opinion here is that Stevenson is the main character of the day, which is one of the loneliest places on earth for a short period of time. If you’ve taken a look at the comments underneath his apology post on the platform formerly known as Twitter, you can easily see what a dark and desolate place that is (full of people, it appears, who have never gotten caught up in the moment and made a mistake in their lives). The same can be said about follow-up posts from reporters covering the team that, indeed, confirmed Stevenson was supposed to be the player containing Commanders receiver Noah Brown, who caught the game-winner off the tip.
We can wring the poor kid out like a washcloth if that’s what makes us feel good, but I am interested in a bigger question about preparation and whether the Bears should have been in that position in the first place.
Expectations for the Bears’ head coaching job ballooned quickly. Matt Eberflus, long believed to be one of the smartest defensive minds in football, was allowed to grow with this roster and iron out some of his own quirks until the moment that Caleb Williams’s name was called at the start of the 2024 draft. Like the rest of the players around him, Eberflus was supposed to hit the ground running in Williams’s rookie season and be the coach capable of managing a stage that has gotten far bigger than it was at this point last year. As one head coach told me long ago, a few months after drafting his own highly-touted rookie: Now, the clock really starts.
And so, in a game that had a stand-alone feel (even if it was simply the pinnacle of the 4 p.m. ET hour and gained viewers once some of the other regional broadcasts became a blowout), this was a moment for Eberflus to shine. He was facing a rookie quarterback, Jayden Daniels, who was somewhat limited physically by a rib injury. Williams was coming off three consecutive games of a QB rating of 100 or better and offensive coordinator Shane Waldron was riding a heater, piloting the fourth-most efficient offense in the NFL between Weeks 4 and 7. While the battle of picks No. 1 and 2 is a media-driven narrative, it’s difficult to argue that the results here didn’t matter, given the billing, the location (in Williams’s home area) and the stakes (the Bears surviving in a brutal NFC North).
So, was the moment too big for him? Or, are we simply overreacting to a game that had a lot of social media low-hanging fruit attached to it? This, to me, is worth examining far closer than the Hail Mary itself and picking on one player.
After rewatching the game, we can certainly nitpick Eberflus as a defensive play-caller though we could do this with just about any coach in a game that didn’t result in a complete blowout. While the Commanders were held to field goals on all of their scoring drives prior to the Hail Mary, one of those field goals was thanks to a false start penalty on Washington in which the Bears also had 12 men on the field. Another was a Zach Ertz nontouchdown that was about a millimeter from being ruled a completion and a touchdown. While I thought the Bears looked their best defensively in the drive immediately after halftime, in which we saw Eberflus’s wave-style pressure cause some issues for Daniels, we should not ignore the fact that all but two of the Commanders’ drives in that half crossed midfield. When the Commanders called a passing play first, the drive had more than an 80% chance of achieving at least one new set of downs.
My main criticisms are broader and get to the heart of how we arrived at the place we did.
Throughout the season and, really, his tenure in Chicago, Eberflus has gotten himself into a handful of prickly clock management and challenge situations that have led to points and sapped the Bears of useful timeouts. Repeated mistakes, such as allowing opponents far too much time on the clock, or failing to capitalize on remaining time with available timeouts, have become a bit of a running joke with the team’s fan base. See: Last year against the Las Vegas Raiders and Detroit Lions, and this year against the Houston Texans and Indianapolis Colts.
Similarly, there seems to be a failure to recognize when to step in and change the team’s direction offensively or to stop a questionable, big-moment play call before it’s occurring. Again, see this year against Indianapolis when the team ran a speed option on fourth-and-goal before the half.
These issues all seemed to converge on the final moments of the Washington game in staccato-like fashion.
For example:
• Eberflus failed to use his timeout before the game’s final play. While it’s impossible to correlate a timeout with getting everyone in a better place mentally, there’s a chance Stevenson would not have been as adrift. Interestingly enough, all-22 sideline footage from before the game-winning Hail Mary shows Caleb Williams dragging Eberflus off the field as he tries to call some of his secondary closer to the line of scrimmage. This is an assumption but, perhaps, he was just as caught up in a flow state as Stevenson was and the symptoms just materialized differently.
• Eberflus (I would guess) greenlit (or at least didn’t scream HELL NO about) the calling of a handoff to the team’s backup center Doug Kramer, known as the Mini Fridge. While the big-man handoff is forever a part of Bears lore and the successful conversion of this play in a big spot would have made the coach a legend, Kramer has taken just 32 offensive snaps all season. Kramer is a useful fullback stand-in and motion blocker, but with the team trailing by a score with fewer than five minutes remaining, it exhibited both Eberflus’s inability to correctly corral calls to his correct playmakers—a flaw I noticed earlier in the game when Chicago threw a fourth-and-1 quick pass to DJ Moore man-up against the hefty 6'3" Benjamin St-Juste (who has a career missed tackle rate well below 10%), despite the fact that Rome Odunze is clearly the team’s most successful tackle-breaking wideout and Moore breaks about one tackle every 16.5 catches.
• Eberflus opted not to pressure Daniels at all on the final drive. While the Bears have one of the lowest blitz rates in the NFL and a middle-of-the-road hurry percentage, Eberflus clearly saw something in the first half that led him to dabble early in the second half. Multiple times during the team’s first defensive stand against the Commanders after halftime, Eberflus either sent cornerback Josh Blackwell or had Blackwell fake before dropping back into coverage. Blackwell purposely positioned himself in Daniels’s line of sight before a handful of snaps on that first drive and Daniels was clearly thrown off his game.
• Along that line, on the play before Daniels’s Hail Mary—the same one in which Eberflus had to be yanked off the field by his quarterback—he only rushed three defenders and had a linebacker ensuring that Daniels didn’t run. I suppose we could call that a “spy” though I really cannot understand why the team would spy Daniels when the quarterback would have almost certainly run the clock out had he decided to scramble. A wide open bullet pass left two seconds on the clock. Daniels running the ball there would have taken infinitely longer.
Are all of these moments more egregious than flexing, pawing and taunting at opposing fans while a live play is happening? Of course not. But do these moments, when balled up together snowball style, create the kind of atmosphere where a player is not dialed in on a critical moment? That’s a question the Bears have to answer for themselves this week. The New York Jets have shown us the cost of making an in-season firing and I’m not suggesting the Bears go down this avenue. However, Eberflus is now on the big stage. At least on Sunday, he struggled to meet the moment.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Tyrique Stevenson Has Become a Main Character, But Bears’ Problems Go Beyond Him.
