Luke Getsy will represent Chicago Bears as a head coach at Senior Bowl
It looks like Luke Getsy will see an opportunity as a head coach come February. No, he won’t be coaching a team in the Super Bowl. Instead, he is going to be one of the head coaches in the Senior Bowl. This should give the Chicago Bears direct and insider access to some of the top prospects who declared for the 2023 NFL Draft.
The Chicago Bears reportedly turned down an opportunity to coach the East-West Shrine Bowl. This opportunity is typically given to the two teams who had the worst season but are not hiring a new coach for the following season. That rules out Houston, the Cardinals the Colts and even the Broncos. With the Chicago Bears passing, that means the first eligible team to be invited to coach the event would be the Los Angeles Rams. It turns out, it will be the Falcons’ and Patriots’ coaching staffs that will take on the coaching challenges of the East-West Shrine Bowl.
There was speculation that since Matt Eberflus and his staff hit the floor running last year, the organization made the decision to allow the staff to zero in on end-of-the-year evaluations before getting some much-needed vacation time to recharge their batteries. The team has plenty of preparation to do in order to be ready to properly spend upwards of $100 million in salary cap space this offseason.
According to Brad Biggs, last year’s East-West Shrine game provided some serious draft prospects as 45 players were selected in the 2022 NFL Draft. He stated that was a 55% uptick over the prior year. Well, it turns out that Luke Getsy isn’t taking vacation time and instead is zeroing in on a better crop of prospects by being the head coach of the Senior Bowl instead. The Senior Bowl saw 106 players selected in each of the last two drafts, making it the better of the two games to focus on.
The Senior Bowl will take place the week prior to the Super Bowl. The game will be played on February 4, 2023, and the three practices that take place prior to the game will be televised on ESPN and the NFL Network. Luke Getsy was announced as the head coach of the American team and Patrick Graham of the Las Vegas Raiders will be the head coach of the National team.
This is the first year of a new “coach up” process and it marks the first time that two full staffs will not be coaching the teams. Instead, it will be a compiled group that was selected from a group of non-playoff teams’ assistant coaches who were nominated by either their respective head coach or general manager. In this case, at least one coach from each of the 16 non-playoff teams was nominated and the Chicago Bears were one of six teams to nominate multiple (4) coaches. Maybe the organization wasn’t as concerned about vacation time for coaches as we thought.
We have seen some big names come out of the Senior Bowl — Justin Herbert, Jalen Hurts, Jeremy Chinn, Brandon Aiyuk, Deebo Samuel, Elgton Jenkins, Creed Humphrey, and Tony Pollard to name a few. The hope is that having Luke Getsy as the head coach of one of the teams gives the Chicago Bears a front-row seat and allows them to dig even deeper into some of these draft prospects who could go on Day 2 or even Day 3 but turn out to be top-level talents in their careers. It also could be the experience Luke Getsy needs to further his career outside of Chicago.