Bears interim coach Thomas Brown will get time, but 38-13 loss to 49ers is horrible start to candidacy
SANTA CLARA, Calif. — One advantage for the Bears in their coaching search is they don’t have to make a decision now on interim coach Thomas Brown. He gets an extended audition, and with it a full five weeks to make his case.
That’s still true after the Bears got blown out 38-13 by the 49ers on Sunday in his debut.
It’s an ugly, scarlet and gold mark on the wrong side of his ledger, but Brown was abruptly promoted from passing-game coordinator to offensive coordinator to head coach in a three-week span and took the helm of a ship Matt Eberflus sunk long before he actually got fired. It’s not necessary or prudent to rush to judgment.
That said, this was a terrible first step in Brown’s quest for the full-time job. At least he knew better than to sugarcoat in his locker room with an Eberflusian speech about adversity and togetherness.
“We got our butts kicked — there’s no other way to say it,” Brown said, recounting what he told his players. “I’m always going to be straightforward, honest and open. We’ve got to do a better job putting together a game plan on both sides of the ball.”
The Bears couldn’t have played worse at Levi’s Stadium and looked ready to be done with this season. Celebrities, they’re just like us! Brown rejected the idea of players checking out, insisting they grasp this is “a grown man’s business” and that “there is no lay down or quit” on his team.
The Bears slid to the brink of playoff elimination by falling to 4-9 — some technicalities involving multi-team ties remain in play — with their seventh loss in a row, but that’s never what this was about with Brown. The loss cemented an inevitability that this will be the Bears’ sixth consecutive non-winning season and 11th in the last 12.
General manager Ryan Poles wasn’t asking Brown to save the season. What he wanted was for him to check several key boxes:
-- Prove his legitimacy as the Bears measure him against top-tier alternatives like Ben Johnson and Kliff Kingsbury.
-- Keep quarterback Caleb Williams soaring into next season.
-- Revitalize a group demoralized by Eberflus’ mistakes and monotony.
Brown made no progress in any of those categories.
As part of stepping into the head-coach role, he’s responsible for everything, so despite spending his entire career until last week exclusively on offense, it was on him to stop their defensive deterioration as they fell behind 21-0 in the second quarter.
At halftime, the 49ers were up 24-0 and had outgained them 319 yards to four.
“Not enough explosives on the offensive side, and gave up way too many on defense,” Brown said.
The Bears are still in transition after Eberflus’ firing. Most coaches have months leading up to their first game; Brown had a little over a week.
“There’s more on the table with how I set schedules and communicate with the team multiple times a day, [and] that’s going to continue to be something I work through, but I don’t make excuses,” he said. “Whether I have a week or five months, the goal is to win. That’s my only focus.”
The key question for Brown is whether the Bears are spiraling toward more losses like this, which surely would take him out of the running, or if he can do what Eberflus never could and turn them around.
The tenacious final four games are the ideal test.
The Bears visit the Vikings on Monday, and they’re fresh off scoring 42 points for their sixth consecutive win. Then they host the Lions, the NFL’s best at 12-1. After that it’s the NFC West-leading Seahawks, winners of four in a row, and then a trip to Lambeau Field, where the Bears haven’t won since 2015.
That’s a lot, but it’s the job. And Brown must do vastly better than this to win it.