Chicago Bears head coach Matt Eberflus is only fooling himself

Matt Eberflus needs to go. I don't care if it's to a defensive coordinator position with another NFL franchise, to his house to spend more time with his family, or to the local Portillo's to make some Italian beef sandwiches for the good people of Chicago. It's abundantly clear, and has been for some time, that he doesn't have what it takes to coach the Chicago Bears.

Eberflus is 6-22 in his nearly two years at the helm in Chicago. He's never won two games in a row, and he's never won a single division game. That's practically impossible to do. I couldn't tell you which Bears' loss under Eberflus has been the most embarrassing, mostly because we've long since passed the point where one can distinguish between our weekly gut punches. My dad and brother were firefighters. Ask them and they'll tell you: when you've seen enough dumpster fires, eventually, they all look the same.

Chicago Bears head coach Matt Eberflus is fooling himself

Listen to Eberflus in his postgame press conferences, though, and you'd think everything was hunky dory. If that phrase sounds dated to you, it's because I'm trying to use the vernacular of the last time in history that Eberflus' brand of football (take the ball out of your quarterback's hands, run the clock, and play prevent defense when you have a lead) actually might have been the cat's pajamas, daddy-o.

"We've had a lot of adversity as the Chicago Bears, and it's only going to make us tougher," Eberflus said after the game, which calls to mind the meme where a worn-down man says, "Stop giving me your toughest battles," to which Jesus replies, "How are you still alive?" At what point have the Bears experienced enough adversity? This once-proud franchise has finished above .500 once in the past decade, yet Eberflus' 28 games mark the absolute nadir of the Bears this century, and Sunday's loss may have been the worst yet.

If Matt Eberflus can't win when the team plays this well, how can Bears fans expect him to ever lead the team to a .500 record, let alone the Super Bowl?

There was so much to like about the Bears' performance on Sunday. Justin Fields looked poised in the pocket and electric as a runner. Khalil Herbert, D'Onta Foreman (before he got injured), and Roschon Johnson finished every run with ferocity. The defense, which has quietly been much improved in the last month, had its best performance of the season, intercepting Jared Goff three times and recovering a fumble. Recent addition Montez Sweat recorded his first sack on an outstanding play.

And yet, the Bears lost again, giving up a 12-point lead in less than four minutes thanks to gutless, scared coaching. Eberflus and offensive coordinator Luke Getsy parked the bus in the fourth quarter, refusing to let Justin Fields throw the ball, despite expressing confidence in Fields in the week leading up to his return as starter and Fields doing nothing to dispel that confidence in the game's first 45 minutes.

Bears fans got their first indication that Eberflus was employing his patented "coach not to lose" style when the Bears ran the NFL's play du jour, the "tush push," on a 3rd and 1 early in the fourth quarter. Despite failing to execute the same play earlier in the season, and despite having a third-string center snapping the ball that had clearly had trouble all day getting on the same page as Fields, the Bears tried it, probably because Eberflus likes the fact that it rhymes. After the sneak unsurprisingly failed, Eberflus kicked a field goal to go up nine.

The Bears were still in total control of the game with 4:15 left, having just kicked another field goal to gain a 12-point advantage. The defense, which had played so well all day in pressuring Jared Goff and forcing him to make contested throws over the middle of the field, suddenly pulled back, allowing the Lions to go 75 yards in six plays without breaking a sweat.

Even with this bit of coaching malpractice, the Bears had the ball up five with 2:59 left, needing only to record two first downs to kill the clock and win the game. With the Lions loading the box, the Bears reached deep into their bag of tricks to call... two straight handoffs up the middle. Ann Arbor is less than an hour from Detroit, but the Lions didn't need Wolverine secret agent Connor Stalions to know what calls were coming in that spot. Worse still was the fact that Fields had over 100 yards rushing on his own, yet he wasn't given a chance to make a play himself.

Fields nearly pulled the game out of the fire anyway when he dropped a dime deep downfield to rookie receiver Tyler Scott on third down, only Scott inexplicably stopped running mid-route. By the time he sped up again, he couldn't reach the perfectly placed ball, and the Bears had to punt.

Every Bears fan already accepted their fate once that third-down throw fell harmlessly to the Ford Field turf. We've seen this script play out too many times, and yet our hearts were still ripped out as we watched the Bears once again sit back and allow Goff to eviscerate them with no resistance whatsoever.

Aidan Hutchinson beat Darnell Wright and stripped Fields for a safety on what was ostensibly the game's final play, but it might as well have been Eberflus who recorded the strip sack himself after the way he and Getsy took the ball out of Fields' hands when the game could have been salted away.

Eberflus was right when he said during his postgame press conference that there was a lot for the team to build on. Fields was a dual-threat dynamo. The defense made Goff miserable all day until Eberflus pulled the plug. D.J. Moore again showed why he's the best Bears receiver since Brandon Marshall.

There's no denying that the Bears have a lot of pieces in place to build around. They had a 7-2 team on the ropes on their home field. They have two high first-round draft picks and a league-leading amount of cap room to work with next year. The picture of what this team is capable of, and just as importantly, what is holding it back, has never been more clear. Matt Eberflus doesn't know how to win, and NFL history is bereft of examples of coaches who started their careers this poorly and then turned it around.

It doesn't matter that Bears fans don't believe Matt Eberflus when he spouts his hollow platitudes after every game. It doesn't even matter if Eberflus believes his empty words himself. All that matters is that Ryan Poles and Kevin Warren see through Eberflus' dime store motivational speaker act and do what's best for the franchise. Maybe it'll be this week, maybe it'll be at the end of the season. Either way, Matt Eberflus needs to go.