Chicago Bears Turn To Matt Nagy To Turn Franchise, And My Life, Around
Hot news on yesterday’s presses: The Bears have decided to tie the wagon to Matt Nagy as their next head coach. After taking a night to think about what this means for the franchise, and more importantly, me, I’ve decided that this was a good decision. Good being relative to the other candidates.
Nagy ran a pretty cool offense for the Chiefs (for atleast part of the season) and found ways to make both Alex Smith and Kareem Hunt effective; and that bodes well for a franchise that needs to develop Trubisky while also giving Jordan Howard and Tarik Cohen sizable roles in the offense. Speaking of Trubisky, Nagy loves him. Nagy didn’t just say he loved him to get the job, but by all reports really liked him coming out of college. That’s huge. We need a coach who truly believes in the guy we’ve got, and I can’t think of a better person to develop Mitch than Nagy.
Of course, what remains to be seen is whether Nagy can (or will) retain Vic Fangio’s services. I’ve already written that I think this should be a huge priority for the team. Fangio turned this defense around just like people look at Nagy to turn the offense around, and the players love him. Head coaching changes can be crazy, and maintaining any level of consistency, especially with a pro like Fangio, would go a long way.
The one piece I haven’t touched on at all yet is Nagy’s ability to handle curses. We all saw how last Saturday’s game turned out (if that game didn’t say curse I don’t know what does) and it’s clear that Nagy couldn’t beat the “Andy Reid will never win a playoff game” curse. Now, there’s no official curse on the Bears yet, but I’ve suspected it for some time now.
It’s a cruel one, for sure. It’s seen us reach the Super Bowl with Rex Grossman (reaching the Super Bowl is only a curse if it's with Rex Grossman). It’s seen us fire Lovie after a 10-6 season. It’s given us Emery and Trestman, Kevin White and Chris Conte, and Gabe Carimi, and J’Marcus Webb. It’s taken away Johnny Knox and Zach Miller. It’s caused 27 of our starters to tear their hamstrings in half during preseason walk-throughs, and again, it gave us Marc Trestman.
I don’t know what we did to deserve this. I don’t know when it came into existence from the dark nether-world of magic. It probably had something to do with the Super Bowl Shuffle. Let’s see what Nagy can do, he’s 0-1 on curses so far, but defeat is the best teacher.
