Lance Briggs Rips into Marc Trestman
Former Chicago Bears’ LB Lance Briggs was never short of an opinion during his playing days. Now that those days are over, he still isn’t biting his tongue.
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In a recent interview with Laurence Holmes of 670 The Score, Briggs laid into former Chicago Bears’ head coach Marc Trestman and discussed several of the issues that the team had under Trestman that led to their meltdown in 2014. After hearing what Briggs had to say, it’s no wonder the Bears completely collapsed last season.
Briggs addressed Trestman’s lack of leadership as a key problem in the locker room.
"We had more fights during the Trestman era than any of the other years amongst our team. You know, we fought a lot. And I’m talking to some friends, and they say on their teams, ‘We fought a lot. We fight here, we fight there.’ But here, we had some fights here and there, but we never fought as much as we fought when Trestman was here."
The increase in fighting was obviously a problem, but how Trestman handled the fights was even more problematic. Briggs continued:
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"We’re fighting and everything, and you want to see your head coach jump in there and stop it. He would never stop it. He would never stop it. As a matter of fact, he would sit on the other side and pretend like he didn’t see anything. It was just tough, man. It was tough. If your head coach isn’t going to lead, if you’re not going to see the leadership out of your head coach, then the team’s going to adopt the identity of your head coach."
Briggs is clearly pointing the finger squarely at Trestman for all the in-fighting that we knew was surrounding the team last season. The Brandon Marshall incident after the Miami Dolphins game got the most publicity, but there were several other incidents that showed that the inmates were running the asylum. There simply wasn’t any leadership.
Briggs didn’t just have an issue with Trestman’s lack of leadership, he also questioned his style as well. Trestman was way to over-involved in the little things, and Briggs said that bothered several players including himself:
"One of the issues for Marc Trestman is he was a micro-manager. He micro-managed everything and everyone, and that’s one of the things that makes you a very good offensive coordinator, because of those little … small things. But when you’re managing men, when you’re leading men, when you micro-manage things and say, ‘Hey, you guys got to make sure all the recycling goes into the recycling bins and all the trash goes in the trash bins,’ and then you watch and he says, ‘Hey, you didn’t put that in the recycling bin — let’s get that in the recycling bin, I told you we’re going to put it all in there …’ it’s like, ‘C’mon man. You’re watching me, you’re watching my every move?’"
Read between the lines, it seems Briggs felt that Trestman felt that he treated the players like children. That is, unless there was conflict, then he kept his head down and did everything he could to avoid it.
The NFL is filled with locker rooms with a lot of testosterone and a lot of large men playing a violent sport. When you have a coach as weak as Trestman running the show, there just is zero chance it’s going to work.
As we finish up the last of the turkey leftovers from Thanksgiving, let’s just be thankful that Marc Trestman is no longer running the show.