For The Win
We’re months removed from his chaotic time coaching the Chicago Bears, and it’s still impossible to overstate Matt Eberflus’s disastrous work with the NFL’s charter franchise.
He didn’t know how to use timeouts. He couldn’t properly motivate his players and seldom took accountability for his own mistakes. He railroaded not one but two separate highly-drafted young quarterbacks just by repeatedly making simple, bog-standard game management mistakes. All of this added up to the third-worst winning percentage (14-32) ever for a Bears coach who was at the helm of the team for more than a handful of games.
Following his Bears ouster, Eberflus is back in the NFL, this time as defensive coordinator for the Dallas Cowboys. That means he’s effectively the lieutenant of (bizarre) first-year head coaching hire Brian Schottenheimer. And that means he’s in a position to give Schottenheimer advice about what NOT to do as a head coach.
That’s not nothing. Here’s more from The Associated Press:
“The first couple meetings I had with him [Schottenheimer], I said, ‘I’m here for you,’” Eberflus said. “I want to really just do a good job of bouncing ideas off of [him], experiences that I had, and just working together to be able to utilize me. Because I do have the experience of being a head coach for him and to make his job easier.”
What makes this especially funny is that I know Eberflus isn’t referring to his head coaching experience as a negative learning tool. Because on how Earth is anyone in their right mind going to take what he suggests seriously in light of the dumpster fire he presided over in Chicago?
The only real things Schottenheimer can glean from Eberflus is to, more or less, do the exact opposite of what he did with the Bears. Take those last-second timeouts. Don’t turtle way too early with a lead. Trust your players and keep them focused at all times. Don’t start preaching accountability when it’s clear you’re only doing it out of self-interest.
If Schottenheimer follows this unofficial manual, perhaps he’ll be in good shape in Dallas.
