Matt Forte: Bears culture changing for the better.

Forte seems like a guy that would have fit in very well with this new culture. Miss watching him play!

The Steelers seem to have a solid culture.  They've been blessed to have had a lot of coaching stability.  The Bears cycle through GMs and HCs about as quickly as I change my underwear (okay, so I do change 'em a bit more often than Bears coaches).  I'm so hoping we have a guy in Eberflus who is a good HC (only time will tell if he is or isn't) and we can keep the guy here like the Steelers do with their HCs.

The Steelers have had 3 head coaches in 55 years... close to 20 years average per HC.  Mike Tomlin, Bill Cowher and Chuck Noll - all defensive coaches, all have super bowl championships.  Cowher & Noll are in the Hall of Fame.  The Steelers have 8 super bowl appearances and 6 SB wins.  Great culture.  Yeah, I'm so hoping this GM/HC can be the beginning of a good one here.  Both were greener-than-a-gourd rookies and it's been a rough ride these first 2 seasons.  But maybe, starting this season, we'll find out they are good.  We're sure due for some of that good luck davidl is talking about   

There were layers of organizational failures with Fields development here.  Some like to argue that it's all on Fields, and he is just a bad player.  Rather than beat that dead horse here, let's set that aside for now and look at the other factors.  It looks like the regime that drafted Fields (Pace/Nagy) drafted a guy who did not fit what Nagy wanted in his offense.  He tried to force Fields to play something he wasn't comfortable at all playing - and if you recall they even made him change his throwing mechanics early-on (lunatic stuff in hindsight to force a rookie to do that sort of thing).  On top of that, the Pace/Nagy regime never provided the offense the player-support that would allow a rookie QB to succeed.  I doubt Caleb would have succeeded in that environment either.  Crap coaches, crap OL, crap receivers... and forced to change his throwing mechanics and then play in a system not really set up for him... it just seemed nuts to me.  If the Bears had carefully planned to screw up a young QB, they couldn't have orchestrated failure any better than that (again, I'm not claiming here that Fields is good or bad... just that the system itself was broken when he was drafted by the Bears).

Pace/Nagy are fired and Poles/Eberflus are hired as 1st time rookie guys - and they were given Fields from the failed regime.  They made a mistake right out of the chute hiring a rookie OC who had never called plays... and had never been an offensive coordinator (his claim to fame was that he had been with Aaron Rodgers... as if some magic might have rubbed off on him - it didn't).  The Bears promptly tank in that first season.  The offense was bad, again.  Then last season it looked like Getsy still wasn't getting it done as OC, and the offense went into the season with injuries on the OL... initially the OL sucked because you had a green rookie RT, a total crap C, Jenkins was on IR, and RG Nate Davis had missed a lot of the off season and preseason due to personal reasons (and then he gets injured).  The OL was a train wreck.  The coach was a train wreck, the WR unit sucked other than DJ Moore.  It wasn't a good situation. 

Getsy was fired at the end of that season and Fields traded.

Should the Bears have had more of a 2024-type offense, supporting Fields when he got here, like Caleb has now?  Certainly.  I tend to think this GM/HC regime inherited a mess and it took 2 seasons to climb out of it on offense - now in the 3rd season, 2024, the GM and HC have learned and build a better offense that can (finally) support a QB here... coaching and supporting roster talent.  So I do blame Poles and Eberflus for some of this too.  But maybe they've learned (the offense sure looks set up for success now).  In fairness they inherited a bad situation and Fields was not their guy they drafted to begin with - and as rookie GM/HC's they had a learning curve themselves to climb.  The Getsy hire was a bad hire, period. 

That's my 2-cents worth on where the team is at now, and how they got here to this point.  Poles and Eberflus could still be successful here.  But we gotta see it now.