Matt Eberflus' Bears are meeting — when they need to meet the moment instead
Coach Matt Eberflus spent last week calling his team resilient.
The Bears then lost by 20.
Words, then, are cheap. So are team meetings. During Monday's regular gathering, the Bears coach opened the floor for players to speak. He does that most weeks, but this came with a purpose: a team that lost on a Hail Mary had then been summarily destroyed by a 4-4 Cardinals team, leaving its season teetering.
"At this team meeting, I just felt like it was real," linebacker T.J. Edwards said before Wednesday's practice. "Just an understanding of we're at a point where we gotta put a good product on the field."
Eberflus, who said Bears players "are all-in" and are "always all-together," preaches transparency between coaches and captains. Tight end Cole Kmet said that honestly shouldn't be interpreted as a rift, while Edwards said that partnership "makes this team special and different."
But both players and coaches know that it's long past time to turn that talking into action.
Sunday's game against the Patriots — who would draft first overall were the season to end today — is a must-win for Eberflus. Any relief the win provides the Bears might be only temporary, though, with the Packers, Vikings, Lions and 49ers next on the schedule. The Bears team that showed up in Arizona will lose all four of those games by double digits.
"It's all gonna be about the grass," Eberflus said. "What we do on the grass."
Kmet said players and coaches talking about the problem is one thing, and action is another.
"At some point, the talking only gets you so far," Kmet said. "You try to solve issues that way. ... You have to go do it on the football field, and that's kind of what we want to start doing here [in practice Wednesday]."
The Bears are taking on water in part because Eberflus couldn't get them to turn the page after they gave up a game-winning Hail Mary to the Commanders. He stumbled through whether he would publicly punish cornerback Tyrique Stevenson for waving at fans while the Hail Mary was being snapped — he didn't start Sunday — and failed to take accountability for strategy decisions before the crushing finish. Players publicly questioned why Eberflus played his defenders back on a 13-yard pass before the Hail Mary and wondered why he didn't take a timeout before the heave.
When Kmet said Bears players could have handled the aftermath better —"I feel like last week was a little bit loud," he said — he spoke from experience. In his fifth season, Kmet has had an up-close view of a lot of Bears drama.
"I've seen a lot of crazy weeks here, I will say," he said with a. laugh. "I don't know if I can say it was the craziest, but it was up there, for sure."
Asked for his top five, he smiled.
"There's more than five," he said.
Kmet understands the disappointment of the fan base with the last two weeks. The team is frustrated, too — and needs to do something about it.
"[Fans] can be as PO-ed as they want to be — that's their every right as a fan," Kmet said. "They can feel how they want to feel in that regard.
"For us, the urgency has definitely kicked in. We've got to get some things figured out, and we haven't done that quite yet."
Rather than meeting, the Bears need to meet the moment."
"Everybody focus in on the details," defensive tackle Gervon Dexter said. "Like Coach Flus said, let's stop talking about it and let's do it. Let's put it on film and do what we talk about."
