Why didn’t the Bears fire the coach mid-season? History says Matt Nagy will finish the rest of the 2021 season
Matt Nagy might have the best Christmas present of them all: Job Guarantee.
There are few guarantees in the NFL, but there can be only one: A Bears head coach will last the length of an NFL season. Even if you are Nagy.
In all, there have only been 16 head coaches in the history of the Chicago Bears and no coach, no matter how bad things got, was given a written exit during an NFL season. Rumors have swirled about Nagy’s job security this season, but Bears owner George McCaskey has quashed those rumors from the start before Thanksgiving.
It’s rare for an NFL coach to be fired mid-season, but for the Bears, it doesn’t exist. Here’s why:
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Why didn’t the Bears fire the coach mid-season?
In its 100-year history, the Bears have never fired a head coach mid-season, for reasons unknown: Whether it’s tradition, reputation, policy or class, in its long history , to their credit, they have never fired a boss mid-season.
Although the Bears have brought on some very bad head coaches in recent years – John Fox, Marc Trestman, two of the predecessors of the Nagy era – not a single one has been fired mid-season. They all lasted at least the season before being taken for a walk.
There are only a handful of teams in the NFL that have yet to fire a mid-season coach, with the Bears being one of them. The other two are model NFL franchises: Steelers and Raven. The Bears’ status as an NFL original may contribute to that.
Coincidentally, since the AFL-NFL merger, Nagy has the second-highest win rate among Bears head coaches with 0.583, behind only Mike Ditka (0.631).
While reports swirled that Nagy’s work was being done ahead of the Bears-Lions Thanksgiving game, Chicago owner George McCaskey insisted to players that there was no truth in the reports, apparently. like securing Nagy’s job in the near future.
Final, NFL Network Ian Rapoport Report that the Bears are also unlikely to fire Nagy during the season, unless something unforeseen happens.
In fact, in-season head coach games are pretty rare in the NFL: Usually, the coaching staff don’t bring in NFL-quality interim coaches, and changing the system to generate the fire for a team against an unproven person is never safe or change safety one way or another.
