What happens when you’re a coach in the NFL and you cannot manage time when it comes down to saving your life? Matt Eberflus’s decision to not call a timeout against the Lions was the last decision of his Chicago Bears tenure. The owner, Virginia Halas McCaskey was tired of nearly 3 years of dismay and decided to do what she’s never done before.

The Bears have never fired a head coach in the middle of the season. But this time, it might have been the right call. Even with a No. 1 draft pick QB, the team is 4-8. The Bears’ playoff dreams have dwindled now. They will have a close, hard look at the 20-23 defeat and hope that their interim head coach, Thomas Brown doesn’t repeat the same mistakes going forward.

Matt Eberflus is worse than a kid?

The Bears trailed 23-20 and were at the Lions 35-yard line for second-and-20 with 36-second remaining. It was at that point when Caleb Williams took a sack for a 6-yard loss. In hindsight, Matt Eberflus should have called a timeout, but he didn’t. The clock wound down to 32 seconds after the sack but had the Bears called that timeout, Williams could have had some time to reset.

Now, the Bears were running a third-and-26 and aimed to throw short passes to get into the field goal range. Still, no timeout. Then there was the matter of Williams’s teammates not lining up on time, wasting more time. In the end, all Caleb Williams had was 6 seconds to make a play to get ahead of the Detroit Lions. So, he lobbed the ball to Rome Odunze, but it felt incomplete. What was Eberflus’s justification for all this?

“Our hope was, because it was third (down) going into fourth, that we would re-rack that play at 18 seconds, throw it inbounds, get it in field-goal range, and then call a timeout,” Eberflus said. “And that’s where it was and that was our decision-making process on that.”

This statement might have deeply irked Mike Florio of PFT, who thought that “any 8-year-old playing Madden would have handled that situation better.” Imagine being a Bears fan and watching your team’s head coach absolutely bomb on a Thanksgiving Day. Truly, a sad state of affairs. With that game, Eberflus slipped down to a 14-32 record, the third-worst coaching record in the franchise history. He never had a winning season with the Chicago franchise.

Virginia Halas McCaskey had seen enough and didn’t wait long and fired Eberflus the very next day.

Matt Eberflus’ mid-season firing turns a new page for Bears ownership

As said before, this is the first time the Chicago football team has ever fired a coach in the thick of things. You know things are bad when your players speak out against you. Case in point, DJ Moore, who thought Eberflus’s decision cost the time to run two more plays. Caleb Williams throwing three touchdowns over 256 yards didn’t mean anything in the end. At least, the people at the top are open to experimenting now and the Bears fans seem happy. Even Mike Florio was relieved that things were finally going in the right direction after 4 decades.

“It’s a belief and it’s an indication that the new regime is turning the tide on the organization that has been dysfunctional for the past 40 years, since the ’85 Bears,” Florio said. He also speculated that the Bears would refrain from hiring a head coach with a defensive background and would have more room for Caleb Williams to develop under an offense-focused coach.

The Chi-town team will be lined up against the San Francisco 49ers in a road game and honestly, it feels like they can beat them. San Francisco is pretty dinged up and if the Windy City team wins, they will keep their playoff dreams alive.