All signs point to the Bears making a coaching change after the season ends, and it doesn’t take much to guess that the they’ll have the offense in mind when lining up their top candidates.
But what if the Bears went in a different direction?
Over at Pro Football Weekly, Greg Gabriel insists the Bears don’t need to hire a coach with an offensive background for the sake of having an offensive mind molding quarterback Mitch Trubisky. Instead, Gabriel believes the next coach simple needs a great offensive staff behind him.
There is a ton of validity in Gabriel’s angle. Both Carson Wentz and Jared Goff made major improvements from Year 1 to Year 2, in part, because of the coaching staffs assembled by their respective head coaches (and not necessarily the head coaches, themselves). We’ve previously discussed how the Eagles and Rams have employed strong assistants to help develop/grow their quarterbacks, and the Bears could do the same – incidentally, some of those coaches will even be lining up for head coaching interviews of their own after the season.
Gabriel believes John Fox’s replacement could come from the following list of candidates, which he says are “the most prominent names being mentioned” at this time:
That’s a list heavy with offensive firepower, but, for three examples, Dave Toub, Dennis Allen, and Matt Patricia are all non-offensive coaches who could have a good idea of how to build a strong staff/develop an offense around a second-year quarterback.
Patricia, currently New England’s defensive coordinator, is an intriguing target, because he cut his teeth with the Patriots as an offensive assistant back in 2004 before being promoted to assistant offensive line coach a year later. He moved to the defensive side of the ball in 2006 where he coached linebackers and he became the defensive coordinator back in 2012. But still, someone with some history on the offensive side of the ball and plenty of defensive coaching experience could be nice.
As a special teams coach, Toub has experience dealing with players on both sides of the ball, as well. More importantly, Toub has extensive experience coaching alongside Andy Reid. The branches on Reid’s coaching tree are quite strong and could stand to grow if Nagy follows in the footsteps of Doug Pederson. Because of their experience alongside Reid, it feels safe to suggest that Toub and Nagy would be in a good position to put together strong offensive staffs.
Of the assistants who aren’t on the offensive side of the ball, Allen is the only one with prior head coaching experience – of course, an 8-28 record is anything but impressive. Still, he has spent the last three years rebuilding the Saints defense in the shadow of Sean Payton. With that said, I don’t see Allen working after things didn’t work out with Akiem Hicks during his time in New Orleans.
In any case, these coaches are just three examples of how the Bears don’t necessarily HAVE to attract a purely offensively-minded skipper to get what they need. They just need to hire the right person, who’s got the offense and a second-year QB’s growth in mind.