The one enduring lesson: Bears will be Bears

Coaches come to the Bears as smiling, positive guys vowing success. Remember when Matt Eberflus was introduced to the media at Halas Hall in January 2022 and joked, ‘‘What, no applause?’’

Uh, no.

Because those same coaches soon exit as baffled, babbling fools, wondering what kind of toxic car wash they just got ejected from.

It’s the Bears. That’s all you can say.

Sorry, guys. You were warned. It’s history. It’s the haunted mansion on the hill with the dressed-up corpse in the window.

Honestly, analyze it all you want. You’ll come back to this: It’s the Bears being the Bears.

They fired Eberflus long after he should have been fired and screwed that up, too. The guy does a 9 a.m. news conference Friday on Zoom after a disastrous Thanksgiving Day loss to the Lions in Detroit, and they fire him two hours afterward?

It’s the Bears. Tone-deaf, clueless humanoids.

Remember when they reported they were hiring a coach they weren’t (Dave McGinnis)? Or when matriarch Virginia McCaskey fired her son Michael, who was sitting beside her in the upper deck of the auditorium at Halas Hall? It was embarrassing on many levels. Watching it was almost more than this scribe could handle.

And there was — and is — the ongoing, endless nonsense about where the Bears’ new stadium will be. The team buys 326 acres in Arlington Heights and says it will build there. Then it won’t. Now maybe it will. Maybe it’ll be on the lake shore. Maybe not. Maybe a spaceship.

Meanwhile, the product on the field is relentlessly putrid.

It’s hard to comprehend this failure. It’s impossible for it to be by accident. It’s unintended, sure, but it’s not random. You can’t flip a coin a hundred times and have it come up tails each time without getting suspicious it’s missing heads.

Consider the Bears’ passing offense.

The Bears are the only team in the NFL never to have a 4,000-yard passer. Their single-season leader is still Erik Kramer, who passed for 3,838 yards in 1995. The snakebit Jets are next with ‘‘Broadway Joe’’ Namath at 4,007 yards in 1967. But the NFL only played 14 games back then, and Namath’s stats, projected for 17 games, would be 4,866 yards.

The Bears are also last in terms of single-season passing touchdowns. That mark also belongs to Kramer, who had 29 in 1995. Peyton Manning threw 55 touchdown passes for the Broncos in 2013. Unfair comparison? OK, how about not-particularly-famous Vikings quarterback Daunte Culpepper, who had 39 touchdown passes in 2004. He also had a season with 33.

Then there’s receiving.

This one tests credulity. The Bears’ career leader in receiving yardage is Johnny Morris with 5,059 in 1958-67. The 49ers’ Jerry Rice is the NFL’s all-time leader with 22,895 yards. The Packers — you’ve heard of them — have had 14 receivers with more career receiving yards than Morris.

Maybe it’s impossible for a family such as the McCaskeys, with 11 children, to control something as wild and wooly as an NFL team. Author Jonathan Eig once wrote that perhaps something better was coming: ‘‘Virginia chose her oldest son — the brightest, most obedient and best educated of the bunch — to run the family business. There was a feeling among the McCaskey clan that Michael could do anything.’’

He couldn’t. He was smart but aloof. He mixed with characters such as Jim McMahon, Steve McMichael and fiery coach Mike Ditka like a poodle in a wolfpack. And, in time, his mom fired him.

First and foremost, the Bears need a quality head coach. It’s not an easy job. A head coach must be smart, know the game, have the players’ confidence, be creative, honest, able to manage underlings and — as became clear from Eberflus’ failure — know how to control the endings of games. To get the right man, you need somebody up the food chain making the right pick.

‘‘We will spend multiple hours a day until we make this hire,’’ president Kevin Warren said Monday.

Who’s the ‘‘we’’? Warren? General manager Ryan Poles? Chairman George McCaskey? Centenarian Virginia herself?

What we do know is that precious rookie quarterback Caleb Williams is now on his third offensive coordinator in four months. If interim coach Thomas Brown is let go at the end of the season, it might mean Williams will get a fourth OC by next season. That’ll mess your head up. That’ll push the career-derailment button.

You wonder whether the Bears can do anything right.

Above all, you wonder whether the House of McCaskey is haunted beyond repair.