New Bears coach Thomas Brown preached accountability to a team that needed it — and then went a step further

It was easy for Thomas Brown to begin his tenure as interim head coach of the Chicago Bears preaching responsibility.

It would also have been easy for Brown to simply express the importance of the pillar and demonstrate it at a later date.

This was just his first press conference as interim head coach, less than a month after he was elevated to offensive coordinator following the firing of Shane Waldron.

But Brown said he wanted his team to embody three “skills: coachability, responsibility and reliability.”

“That’s all of us, including myself,” he said Monday afternoon. “I’m not above coaching. I am not above responsibility. We will arrange that together.”

Then he showed it.

Before opening the floor to questions, Brown brought up the team’s recent late-game losses, unprompted. The Bears lost to the Washington Commanders in late October on a poorly defended Hail Mary. They have lost their last three games by a combined seven points thanks to a blocked kick, sputtering overtime and a mismanaged clock.

Matt Eberflus was an easy scapegoat after he was fired on Friday. Brown didn’t stop the buck there.

“I know there’s a lot of investigation, talk and dialogue about what happened at the end of some of these games,” Brown said Monday. “I am not exempt from responsibility for these actions.

“The word ‘team’ — I believe in doing things together. We are rewarded together, we are also criticized together. So we will have an internal process that we will go through on a weekly basis to prepare for those opportunities. And on game day we execute.

“Don’t panic, have excellent communication, be ready for the moment, make a decision and run with it.”

On Thanksgiving, the Bears rallied from a 16-0 halftime deficit to defeat their division rival Detroit Lions 20-7 in the second half. Then they got the ball back with 3:31 to play, on their own 1-yard line.

Rookie quarterback Caleb Williams found receiver DJ Moore for 25 yards on a third-and-7, and 21 on a fourth-and-4. Williams recovered from one sack to scramble for 14 yards and the other to scramble for 13 yards. In total, the Bears moved 52 yards. But after a sack with 31 seconds to play, the Bears did not call a timeout. Williams tried to rush his team as there were four meters between them and their expected goal range. Instead, the clock ran out after a missed pass to Rome Odunze. The Bears lost 23-20.

Not even a field goal was attempted.

Why?

Brown addressed the blunder publicly and to his players.

“Like I said to the offense this morning, there’s a lot of dialogue about those last few plays, the last seconds,” Brown said. “I concentrate more on the events leading up to it – the opportunities well before that moment to end the game, to end the game.

“So yes, it is important for us to take action in those moments. But don’t forget that we had several chances throughout the match. We dug ourselves into a hole in the first half and fought our way back into the game… [and] had several opportunities to execute before that.

Brown modeled for his players what it means to face mistakes. He could have leaned on his earlier statement that “no one cares about what happened before,” but a coach who preached “it’s not about the event – ​​it’s about the reaction” instead responded by refusing to include Eberflus to throw a bus and by acknowledging his criticism. own role.

“I won’t get into the weeds of what was and wasn’t communicated because that’s not relevant, that’s over now,” Brown said. “But I certainly had the opportunity to learn from it.

“And I don’t absolve myself of responsibility in those scenarios.”