When recent rumors surfaced that Mike McCarthy may have interest in the Chicago Bears head coaching opening, many were quick to dismiss this as an uninspiring hire, the last thing that rookie quarterback Caleb Williams needs if he wants to reach the heights he's striving for in his career.
However, while McCarthy shouldn't be atop anyone's head coaching list, he is still a strong candidate and worth seriously considering, especially for a team like the Bears that has lacked any sort of stability at the head coaching position.
In fact, there are a few elements of McCarthy's resume that should be especially appealing to a team like the Bears, notably surrounding the offensive line and his experience with Aaron Rodgers, someone Caleb Williams has admitted he has modeled his game after.
McCarthy teams, in his head coaching record spanning 2008-2018 in Green Bay with Aaron Rodgers and 2020-Present in Dallas, has only had his team give up 50 or more sacks twice (50 in 2009, 51 in 2012). Both of these totals are significantly lower than the 58 sacks the Bears have given up on average each year since 2020.
His presence on the Bears coaching staff would definitely alleviate some of the Bears' issues in the trenches, as his teams with Aaron Rodgers gave up around 40 sacks per year on average and his teams in Dallas have given up 36 sacks per year on average, both of which are good for being a borderline top 10 team in terms of fewest sacks allowed year to year.
Part of the reason why McCarthy's success with his offensive lines is notable, especially with Green Bay, is that the Packers consistently identified late round prospects and turned them into quality if not star-level starters on the field. From 2008 to 2018, many of the Packers' most prominent and longest-lasting offensive linemen were all late round picks.
Names like Josh Sitton, TJ Lang, Marshall Newhouse, David Bakhtiari, and Corey Linsley were all found by the Packers in the fourth and fifth rounds spanning a decade's worth of draft classes. Between them, they have 632 games played, multiple pro bowl selections, and multiple all-pro selections.
Bringing McCarthy to the Bears could especially be a fit with Ryan Poles and Ian Cunningham, should they stick around. They've shown to prefer building offensive lines with late-round picks, and maybe pairing them with McCarthy could help them identify the right ones.
The second biggest positive of a McCarthy-Bears pairing is his experience with Aaron Rodgers. Caleb Williams has spoken multiple times about how he's modeled his game after Rodgers, and there is value in bringing in the coach who developed Rodgers in the early phase of his career and won a Super Bowl with him.
The biggest drawback, one I'd acknowledge is probably true, is that McCarthy raises the floor of a team, but may put a ceiling on their success. However, this is a misleading way of evaluating coaches. A great coach with average to below-average quarterback play can take a mediocre team and make them good (see: Tomlin's work in Pittsburgh over the past few years). A great quarterback with a below average coach can only go so far too (see: Zac Taylor, Joe Burrow and the Bengals).
The Bears have a quarterback prospect on their hands that has the potential to be transcendentally great, but they need a coach. Pairing Caleb Williams with a known commodity has value, and if it works out, the Bears may not need their coach to raise their ceiling because they'll have the quarterback to do it for them. I.e., they'll have achieved a good coach-great QB pairing, and that's one that can yield sustained success.
The last and arguably most significant reason, why the Bears should not scoff at the notion of McCarthy being their next coach is because he has shown the ability to thrive and succeed amidst dysfunction. On the NFL franchise scale of dysfunction, there are teams like the Cowboys on one end (the dysfunctional end) and teams like the Packers on the other (highly functional). McCarthy has had success in both places and the Bears, who fall closer to the Cowboys on the scale of dysfunction, surprisingly would be a step up for McCarthy as he'd be free of meddling and noisy ownership.
The Bears don't have the infrastructure in place that makes anyone's job as easy as it should be, and they should value having a coach who can thrive in spite of a bunch of moving parts around them. It shouldn't be the Bears' goal to be so dysfunctional in the first place, but considering where the team is right now and the importance of Caleb Williams' development, a stable, offensive-minded coach with a track record of success is something no team, especially the Bears, should be turned down without second thought.
All in all, McCarthy is (and should not be) the Bears' first choice to be their next coach. Yet, he has been more successful in his last 15 years of coaching than every Bears coach combined over that time period. As a result, his interest in this job and his qualifications for it should be seriously considered, even if all that comes from an interview is an honest assessment of the Bears' shortcomings for the past decade.