The big trap the Chicago Bears could fall into when hiring an OC
Too often these new West Coast Offenses are not risky enough
The Bears’ Matt Nagy era using the WCO was very often a nightmare of cowardly as well as ass-backward play calls made in clutch moments. Can anyone say for certain that Matt LeFleur is a great play-caller without Aaron Rodgers? We should find this out in the near future. Kyle Shanahan had to blow a 25 point lead in the Super Bowl before he learned his lesson that being super predictable by using an abundance of WCO short passes is a path to bitter failure.
Like Shanahan, Sean McVay of the Rams is an extremely smart WCO play-caller. He has the advantage of self-confidence greatly aided by growing up with a grandfather who was the general manager of five Super Bowl winners in San Francisco. He finally decided he needed a big upgrade at QB over Jared Goff in order for him to experience the promised land of a Super Bowl winner.
In the last 10 seasons, the six Super Bowl-winning teams that did not use the WCO were guided by these quarterbacks: Joe Flacco and Eli Manning — who are not considered franchise quality quarterbacks — the other four were the on and only Tom Brady. Brady used the Patriots’ version of the spread offense and Bruce Arians’ version of a vertical offense.
It takes lots of guts to win a Super Bowl. In my opinion, looking from afar, this type of courage is not likely to be found in the inexperienced WCO play-callers that currently appear to be on the Bears list of offensive coordinator candidates. They will surely want to please their head coach who does not want his defense to have to deal with any “unforced” turnovers.
The history of head coaches shows they often are like a parent who favors one child over another. Unfortunately, in this pass-happy era of the NFL, protecting the defense over scoring touchdowns has proven to be quite the consistently losing strategy. This is the deep pitfall the new regime of Ryan Poles and Matt Eberflus appear to be thinking about jumping into headfirst.