Chicago Bears President Kevin Warren sat alongside general manager Ryan Poles on Monday at Halas Hall and said they would work “in tandem” to find the team’s next head coach.
Warren said Poles will remain the GM and will be the “point person” in identifying the replacement for Matt Eberflus, who on Friday became the first head coach fired midseason in Bears history.
Citing the Bears’ salary cap space, young roster, upcoming draft capital and, of course, rookie quarterback Caleb Williams, Warren called the Bears opening “the most coveted job in the National Football League this year.”
He promised an exhaustive, detailed and organized coaching search and expressed his faith in Poles, who hired Eberflus in 2022 and retained him into this season. Eberflus finished his Bears career with a 14-32 record. The Bears named offensive coordinator Thomas Brown the interim head coach for the final five games.
“Ryan is young. He’s talented. He’s bright. He’s hard-working,” Warren said. “He has done everything in his power on a daily basis to bring a winner to Chicago. And I’m confident in Ryan. My faith remains strong in Ryan.”
This will be the first Bears head coach search for Warren, the former Big Ten Commissioner and Minnesota Vikings executive who was named team president in January 2023.
When Warren was asked initially who would have the final say on a coaching decision, he gave a 112-word answer about how he and Poles would work together, spending multiple hours a day identifying the right person for the Bears. Pressed on what would happen if they had dissenting opinions, he eventually said Poles would have the final voice.
“We’ll work that out,” Warren said. “Ryan is the general manager. He’s the head of football operations, so he will have the final say if it ever got to that point, but I’m confident that we will work through it. … So long as we keep the center of our decisions what’s in the best interest of the Chicago Bears, our players, as we go forward, it will become clear as far as who is the person to lead this franchise from a football standpoint, from a coaching standpoint.”
In a 21-minute news conference that was nearly half opening statements, Warren and Poles touched on a few aspects of the upcoming search while Chairman George McCaskey watched from the side.
Poles said they still are determining whether they will use an external or internal search committee. Poles said he didn’t know how much input Williams would have on the hiring but said having a plan for a young quarterback would be a major requirement for the next coach.
Warren listed other qualities he will try to identify in candidates.
“We need an individual who has extremely high standards, who is tough, who is demanding,” Warren said. “Who is bright, who has attention to detail, who seeks and will win championships, who creates an environment of accountability, who’s creative, who’s intelligent, who’s a decisive decision maker, and who will represent the city of Chicago, all of our fans, this franchise, in a manner that is well deserved.”
Poles didn’t have a long process in the previous search that landed on Eberflus.
In the wake of the Ryan Pace and Matt Nagy firings, a Bears search committee interviewed general manager and coach candidates simultaneously and then hired Poles on Jan. 25, 2022. Over the next two days, Poles interviewed previously vetted coaching finalists, including Eberflus, Dan Quinn and Jim Caldwell, and the Bears named Eberflus the coach on Jan. 27.
This time, Poles said he plans to cast as wide a net and take as much time as he needs to find the right candidate. He said setting a foundation of identifying what they want in a coach will be key, and he thinks that knowing his roster well now will help him.
“It was a really tough situation to walk into (last time),” Poles said. “So knowing exactly the core of our team and what traits are going to help get that team to be a championship-caliber roster (will help).”
Poles is responsible for bringing Eberflus back for a third season and engaging in a process that resulted in Eberflus hiring offensive coordinator Shane Waldron in January 2024 to replace fired OC Luke Getsy. Waldron lasted just nine games this season before the Bears fired him.
Poles said with Waldron there was “some communication that probably didn’t happen as clean as it needed to be” within the offense as the Bears tried to get Williams’ development on the right track.
As for Eberflus, an “environment of accountability” and a “decisive decision-maker” were two of the phrases in Warren’s list of coveted coach qualities that stood out because they were areas of concern this season.
The latter, of course, came up in the final seconds of Thursday’s 23-20 loss to the Lions, when Eberflus didn’t call a timeout to aid Williams in executing the game’s final plays before time ran out. Poles identified such late-game issues as one thing that led to the firing of Eberflus.
“When you look at the end-of-the-game situations, just some of the detailing to finish in those moments,” Poles said. “We all know a lot of these games come down to those critical spots that we weren’t able to get over the hump.”
Poles said he sensed the frustration from players in the locker room after the game in Detroit, and that was taken into account when making the decision.
“It’s important always to have a pulse of the locker room and an understanding of what’s going on, because the one thing that I can say is our players, our team, played extremely hard through adverse situations,” Poles said. “You don’t want a situation where that starts to crack, and you don’t see the same effort and the same energy. We’re always being aware of the environment and taking that into consideration.”
The Bears came under fire Friday after allowing Eberflus to go on his usual day-after-game Zoom news conference with reporters — where he said he was confident he would be coaching the Bears this week — and then firing him a few hours later.
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Warren said the Bears hadn’t yet made a decision on Eberflus’ fate when the 9 a.m. news conference was scheduled to begin. He, Poles and McCaskey decided to gather the morning after Thanksgiving with clearer heads than they had that night and were still meeting when Eberflus addressed reporters.
“In retrospect, could we have done it better? Absolutely, and I’ll be the first one to raise my hand, yes,” Warren said. “But during his press conference and even a couple hours later, we had not reached a decision.”
Warren said they had a thoughtful discussion that resulted in the firing.
He called the next six weeks “critical” as the Bears align their search, though they are not allowed to begin requesting interviews with candidates employed by other teams until the end of the regular season. And he didn’t downplay the importance of the weeks and months ahead.
“You hate saying that decisions are going to set the trajectory of the franchise over the next 10 to 15 to 20 years, (but) this is one that will,” Warren said.
That Poles is leading the search after hiring the last failed coach injects skepticism into the Bears’ upcoming proceedings. But Warren said he believed that “this was the day that we start pointing in the right direction to build the franchise that all of us know that we want to build.”
And he will continue to count on Poles to help him do that.
“There are a couple different types of people. There are people who can find fault, and there are people who can find fault and come up with solutions,” Warren said. “One of the things I appreciate working with Ryan is that he’s one of the people that will raise his hand and say, ‘Hey, this is something that we could’ve done better, but here’s some solutions.’ And we’re committed to doing that.”
