Tag: fire matt nagy

Anatomy of a play: Fourth-and-1 disaster sums up everything wrong with Bears’ offense

The Bears have more than enough reasons to fire Matt Nagy right now. But one fourth-and-1 against the Vikings provided an additional argument.

With 1:02 left in the third quarter of the Bears’ Monday night game against the Vikings, Chicago tried to convert from the Minnesota 21-yard line. Chicago was down 17-3, so any score would have helped. Running back David Montgomery, who had gained one yard on the previous play, ran to the sideline because of an issue with his helmet. So, with receiver Darnell Mooney in the backfield, and obvious confusion in the huddle, the Bears tried to extend their drive.

Things did not go as they’d hoped. Quarterback Justin Fields ran a play-action fake to nobody, because Mooney had already run to the flat when Fields was ready. Running back Khalil Herbert was not in the backfield for whatever reason; he ran a crossing route from left to right as tight end Cole Kmet headed up the numbers to the end zone. Fields rolled to his right, didn’t see Mooney in the flat when he was open, and by the time Kmet was open in the end zone, Fields had been sacked by Vikings defensive lineman D.J. Wonnum.

The play was a disaster from start to finish.

“Yeah, that’s a play design we’ve had in all year long, and I’ve got to see it on tape,” head coach Matt Nagy said after the game. “It was on the opposite sideline. But they obviously covered it, so it was just — give credit to the defense.”

Wait. That was a designed play? You guys did that on purpose?

Alrighty then.

Fields was more detailed when asked about it.

“The play was for Mooney, but they were in Cover-2, [the] corner sat on it and he didn’t move. But yeah. I mean, I had an opportunity to go low-high-low, but of course at the perfect time when Mooney was open I wasn’t looking, I was looking for the over [Herbert] coming around. But yeah, they just called up a great defense for that play.”

Fields also said that Mooney was supposed to be the first read.

“The corner was there, Cover-2. So in Cover-2, the corner has the flat defender. He’s responsible for the flat. Darnell was running for the flat, so he sees Darnell running right there. Took my eyes to the corner, took my eyes to the over route, and when I took my eyes to the corner and the over route, the corner backed off a little bit. Then when I got back to Mooney, the corner came back. Again, like if I know that next time, if I see Cover-2, I’ll rip and just, boom, go low-high-low, right down, get the corner to move back and hit Mooney in the flat. It’s just an instance where you learn.”

As has been the case all season, Fields is a young quarterback who is learning how to adapt to NFL coverages. And as has been the case all season, he is getting absolutely no help from his head coach and alleged offensive play-designer when it comes to the passing game.

The Monday Night Football crew insisted that Nagy should have taken a time out to reconsider his options after Montgomery ran off the field. That’s how much this looked like a busted play from the start. For Nagy to say that this was the design of the thing is yet another reason he should not be the Bears’ head coach, or alleged offensive play-designer, for one more day.

Four NFL head coaches who should see early Black Mondays

Burn This Play! Matt Nagy butchers the Emory & Henry formation

The Emory & Henry formation can be an effective strategy when used correctly. To nobody’s surprise, Matt Nagy’s version was a disaster.

Bears head coach Matt Nagy should send a nice floral arrangement to Jaguars head coach Urban Meyer, because without Meyer’s serial sulky incompetence, we’d be talking even more about how the Bears, a founding NFL organization, should fire a head coach in-season.

Coming into Week 15, it appears that nothing Nagy does will get him canned. Nagy’s utter lack of situational, schematic, and personnel awareness comes up all the time, but here’s where we are if we’re the Bears.

On Sunday, the Bears lost to the Packers, 45-30, to slip to 4-9 on the season. That’s the most losses they’ve had since they lost 11 games in 2017, which marked the end of the John Fox tenure, and the beginning of the Bears’ “Hey, let’s hire Andy Reid’s most prominent offensive assistant” mistake.

Perhaps the most egregious example of Nagy being over his skis in this particular game came with 2:39 left in the third quarter, and the Packers up, 38-27. Quarterback Justin Fields had just missed receiver Jakeem Grant on a great sideline throw on first down — it was just a bit off, and Grant couldn’t quite bring it in before he was out of bounds. So, the Bears had second-and-10 from their own 13-yard line, and Nagy decided to break out the old Emory & Henry formation.

What is the Emory & Henry formation? We’re glad you asked!

Matt Nagy can’t even escape ‘Fire Nagy’ chants at his kids’ football game

Matt Nagy critics are getting loud. “Fire Nagy’ chants were heard at his kids’ high school football game.

There’s rarely a head coach whose hot seat is so publicly hot, but Chicago Bears HC Matt Nagy is feeling the heat even in the bleachers of a high school stadium.

On the weekend of Nov. 20, attendees of the Lake Forest High School (Ill.) game against Cary-Grove High School (Ill.) started a “Fire Nagy” chant. The NFL coach has two sons who are listed on the Lake Forest roster.

The sound of the chanting could be heard on the NFHS Network livestream of the event. It prompted Cary-Grove, which was hosting the game, to issue an apology for the chant.

The principal chose the words carefully in the statement, referring to Nagy not by name or as a public figure but instead saying the chant was “targeting the parent of one of the Lake Forest team members and his family.”

It also said the students who lead the chants were talked to and given a chance to reflect.

Bears fans have been making their chants heard throughout sports, including at Bulls and Blackhawks games. Nagy has, to his credit, tended to take the chants in stride in the eye of the public, saying to media, “I just understand in the end that we all care a lot.” Directed as trash talk to his kids, though, takes it to a different level.

Touchdown Wire’s Thanksgiving Day preview podcast

Touchdown Wire’s Doug Farrar and Mark Schofield preview Thanksgiving’s three NFL games, and give their holiday cooking tips!

Thanksgiving Day is near, and that means it’s time for NFL football! Also, the Lions and the Bears! With that in mind, Touchdown Wire’s Doug Farrar and Mark Schofield are here to preview the three Turkey Day games on the slate, for better or worse.

First, Mark and Doug give their holiday cooking and eating tips (it’s a marathon, not a sprint, kids!), and Mark reveals the tremendous culinary challenge he’s about to face.

And then, the football! Among the topics discussed:

  • A few reasons to actually be thankful for the Lions-Bears matchup, and whether Detroit and Chicago respectively should hang on to Jared Goff and Khalil Mack;
  • Why the Raiders-Cowboys matchup could be more of a rock fight than a shootout, and why the “blueprint” talk surrounding Dak Prescott has gained legitimate steam; and…
  • What do you do if you’re Sean Payton, and you may be short your top two running backs and both starting tackles, and you have to deal with the Bills’ awesome pass defense?

Listen to the podcast on Omny Studio:

Or on Spotify:

And watch it on YouTube!

 

Happy Thanksgiving to all our readers and listeners!

Bears QB Justin Fields shows what can be done with a real play-caller

Bears quarterback Justin Fields had much better play-calling in his second NFL start. Will head coach Matt Nagy allow it to continue?

Last week, Bears rookie quarterback Justin Fields had his first NFL start, and it was an abject disaster. With head coach Matt Nagy as the play-caller, and Nagy waiting around for Andy Dalton to be healthy, and then finding out that Dalton wasn’t going to be able to go against the Browns, Fields was given a leaky boat full of anchors, and he responded accordingly. With one of the worst systems you’ll ever see for a young quarterback, Fields completed six of 20 passes for 68 yards. He was sacked nine times for 67 yards, which obviously left Fields with one net passing yard. Nagy refused to give Fields the benefits of play-action and pre-snap motion. He refused to acknowledge him as a runner. He refused to give him favorable route combinations at any level of the field.

How Matt Nagy failed Justin Fields

It was a fireable offense. But the Bears as an organization have never fired a head coach in-season, and they’ve been around since 1920, so it wasn’t going to happen now. However, and quite fortunately, Nagy was convinced to hand over the play-calling duties to offensive coordinator Bill Lazor in Week 4 against the Lions. Fields’ day wasn’t perfect, but it was much better. He completed 11 of 17 passes for 209 yards, no touchdowns, one interception off a deflection, and just one sack — which Fields said after the game was on him.

Nagy has insisted that Dalton will be the no-matter-what starter when he’s healthy, and we all know that, and it makes no sense, but perhaps the most distressing thing about Nagy right now is his desperate need to claim credit for a win that would not have been possible had he not walked away from offensive play-calling duties.

“Yeah, so in regards to the play calling, Bill did a great job, and I think that at the same point in time, it’s important that we understand that I had to — I felt good out there as a head coach, and that’s real,” Nagy said after the game. “But we all get together. We talk through how we’re going to call the game, and we do that when I’m calling plays, too. Us as a staff, we get together. So I think that that’s important for everybody to know is that when we build a game plan together, whether it’s the offensive line coach with Juan or whether it’s our tight ends coach or wide receiver coach, et cetera, we do it together, and in the end, I get a great opportunity to say yes, I like this, or no, I don’t. 

“As the head coach, right, in charge of all that, that’s real. When you do that now, I also go back to saying last week, right, or — last week was hey, whatever I need to do to try to be the best head coach for the Chicago Bears, whatever that is, I don’t care, I just want us to have the best opportunity to win, and I feel like Bill did a great job today. Our players did a great job. Our coaching staff did a great job, and we played collectively together as a team, not just players, not just coaches, everybody. 

“When you have that, it’s a good feeling. So we’ll continue to just keep talking. We’ll continue to — but again, with all due respect, all due respect, this is going to be the last time I talk about it.”

Nagy was then asked whether Lazor would continue to call plays going forward, and that’s where he short-circuited. It’s an entirely reasonable question given the massive uptick in Fields’ performance with Lazor at the wheel, but he wasn’t having it.

“Like I said — you’re unbelievable. You try — listen, I hope you understand, I get it. I get it. I get it. But just know, like that’s it. No more with this.”

A confident coach would go out of his way to praise his offensive coordinator after a game like this. One of the reasons Nagy, the former Chiefs offensive coordinator, got this job in the first place is that Andy Reid has to be restrained from telling people how great his coaches are. But that’s the situation as it stands. We don’t know how long Fields will be the starter. We don’t know how long it will be before Nagy takes the call sheet over again. But for now, we can enjoy several examples of an offense that worked for a rookie quarterback coming off a disastrous first NFL start. While Nagy wants to keep this all on the QT, we’ll praise the difference with Lazor.

Because it was crushingly obvious. Let’s look at the big-time throws against the Lions to see what they tell us. Fields completed one pass of 20 or more air yards in three attempts for 21 yards before Sunday’s game. Against Detroit, he attempted six such passes, completing four for 151 yards. And they each tell a story of the successful partnership between Lazor and Fields.

How Matt Nagy failed Justin Fields

Bears head coach Matt Nagy sent rookie quarterback Justin Fields out to sea with a boat full of anchors against the Browns. The tape tells the story.

There are coaches who are highly regarded for their ability to develop and bring the best out of quarterbacks. Andy Reid of the Chiefs is certainly one, and that’s been the case for decades — certainly during his time with the Eagles from 1999 through 2021, as well. When the Bears hired former Chiefs offensive coordinator Matt Nagy in 2018, they were obviously under the assumption that Nagy had picked up enough from Reid to right a quarterback situation that hasn’t been above league average since World War II, and most of the time, “league-average” would be damning the Bears with faint praise. Nagy had been with Reid since 2008 as a coaching intern with the Eagles, and he’d moved his way up to offensive quality control, then quarterbacks coach, then offensive coordinator. Were Nagy to turn out to be some sort of schematic and philosophical fraud, you could give the Bears the benefit of the doubt — if Andy Reid trusted this guy this much, why shouldn’t we?

We’re now three games into the fourth season of the Matt Nagy Experiment, and it’s worse than it’s ever been. No quarterback under Nagy has been able to maintain even a middle-tier combination of efficiency, explosiveness, and efficiency. Even after Nagy, offensive coordinator Mark Helfrich, and offensive assistant Brad Childress were able to help Mitchell Trubisky to a 24-touchdown, 12-interception season in 2018, Trubisky started to regress as the coaching staff under Nagy changed. Then, it was the decision to add Nick Foles to the roster, which has been another exercise for which the Bears have seen very little. Before the 2021 season, Chicago signed veteran placeholder Andy Dalton to a one-year, $10 million contract, and then traded up in the draft to select Ohio State’s Justin Fields with the 11th overall pick.

As expected, this has also been a disaster. Through the preseason, Nagy planted Dalton with the starters and kept Fields with the backups until the final preseason game. Despite that, Fields proved more able in every possible category — from operating under pressure to throwing the deep ball. Dalton remained the starter on a no-matter-what basis until he suffered a knee injury against the Bengals in Week 2 that now has him week-to-week.

So, it was time for Fields to start in Week 3 against the Browns. At the same time Nagy was telling everyone that Dalton would be the starter going forward no matter what Fields did, he was ignoring the playbook for his young quarterback in a truly epic fashion.

The results were entirely predictable. In a 26-6 thrashing by the Browns, Fields completed six of 20 passes for 68 yards, no touchdowns, no interceptions, nine sacks for 67 lost yards, and a quarterback rating of 41.2.

How bad was it? Historically so.

Two of ESPN’s better analysts, former NFL quarterback Dan Orlovsky and former head coach and defensive coordinator Rex Ryan, excoriated Nagy in Sopranos fashion.

“The Chicago Bears should fire Matt Nagy today.” Orlovsky said. “Because yesterday’s game plan, which was the worst one I’ve ever seen in my life, was either negligence or intentional. It’s been 149 days since the Bears drafted Justin Fields. You had 149 days to start to build a game plan around the skill set of this young man. And it was an embarrassment. Justin Fields threw the ball 20 times yesterday. 13 times, the Bears went with five-man protection, with no help for their offensive line. Yesterday, [Nagy] showed us that [he] is either incapable of designing the proper game plan around a dynamic young quarterback, or [he] showed us that it was intentional. That you wanted him to fail, and you set him up to be a disaster.”

Ryan then chimed in.

“I told you so! I told you three years ago! You’re wasting a championship-level… maybe not a championship-level, but a good defense, and this guy has no creative thing. I’m a dumb defensive coach, right? I’m so dumb, I’m going to drop back 30 times, and go 21 times with five-man protection. Are you out of your mind? I wouldn’t do that with Tom Brady. This is absolutely ridiculous. And I said it from Day 1. I loved Mitchell Trubisky. [Nagy] never gave him a damned chance. You won Coach of the Year riding the back of that kid, and then you threw his ass away. And how you also have Nick Foles. Great job. You got a guy who’s proven not to be an NFL starter. And this is your decision. You drafted a guy with unbelievable ability, and you’re going to go out there and get him killed. I don’t get it.”

Trubisky, by the way, equaled Fields’ passing yardage total of one net yard with one completion as the Bills’ mop-up quarterback.

As Orlovsky pointed out, the Bears moved the pocket just once in the first half. Orlovsky also pointed out that Nagy’s third-down calls were far too repetitive, and the tape doesn’t lie.

“When you look at games like this with the competitor in you, it’s hard with numbers like this to where we are offensively,” Nagy said after the game. “The competitor in you gets frustrated, but at the same point in time, I think that’s probably one of my greatest strengths is my care and want to get this thing fixed. You have to rebound back. Staying positive with the coaches and the players, when you have guys that do care, and you have guys that want to get better. They do it for each other. They don’t do it for themselves, and that’s where I’m going to come at this thing from and understand that we get to play another game next Sunday against a division opponent. When we get back to the facility, back at Halas Hall, get to the why’s and then fix it and move on.”

On Monday, Nagy made his response to the “why’s” pretty clear, if entirely confusing.

Detailing everything that went wrong with the plan would require a small book, but let’s get forensic with a few of the primary issues.