Waiting4Godot

I do agree with a lot of what you've said but: 1. And to whom does Warren answer? George. Eventually, it's a McCaskey at the top of the mountain. And garbage rolls downhill. 2. Why is Daniels thriving in Washington with fewer weapons to support him than Caleb has, but with a "modern" OC (who'd already coached Caleb at USC) but who the Bears turned down to hire Waldron? 3. It didn't take Houston's new GM/Coach five years to build a .500 team. Doesn't look like it'll take Washington's that long, either. To name just two franchises turning things around. I don't think, for the record, that Poles has done an awful job (unlike Eberflus, who HAS done an awful job). But I don't think he's done a great one, either.

Patrick and Whitehair starting (with success) elsewhere underlines that the problem isn't the roster. It's the coaching. (By extension, Shelton was at a minimum competent in LA, but appears all but useless in Chicago). So we can spend the next fourteen games talking about how to rearrange the deckchairs on the Titanic but the ship will probably still go down if the captain isn't changed. Our coaching team is collectively unfit for purpose. Proof of that lies everywhere you look. They're hired and retained by a GM who therefore by definition can't be fit for purpose. But they're all great guys so here we are.

Where hiring is concerned, it seems to me that the Bears search out football staff based on a candidate's compliance with an identikit list of personal characteristics that are wholly unrelated to their being qualified to succeed in actually doing the job. In essence, to be recruited in Chicago your face needs to fit a profile that the McCaskey family deems consistent with its own personally-held values, which means the key to getting a job with the Bears is to look right, talk right, not swear, and so on. That's why we've had years of the team in the hands of "grey men"; high character (sic) individuals like Poles, Eberflus, Nagy, Pace, and so on none of whom are qualified for their jobs but all of whom you'd introduce to your mother (she's called Virginia, by the way). Which of them, if you were rational, would you really let anywhere near running your pro football team? That was a rhetorical question. The proof? Well, Eberflus is still here, isn't he? There wasn't a single compelling reason to be drawn from two years of evidence that suggested keeping him at the end of last season would be a good idea, other than his face still fitting the personal profile the McCaskey's want from their head coach. And Flus' great leap forward between years two and three? To burnish his profile with a new haircut and beard, further qualifying him as a McCaskey-fit head coach. But all he really achieved was proving that the old adage is true: You can't polish a turd (but you can roll it in glitter).