Here’s what Chicago Bears coaching search will look like with Kevin Warren, Ryan Poles working ‘in tandem’

LAKE FOREST – Chicago Bears team president and CEO Kevin Warren believes Monday signaled a sea change for the historic 105-year-old professional football organization.

“We will get this right, and we’ll be sitting up here in the future at some point in time, that we’ll look back on to this day and say, this was the day that, really, that we start pointing in the right direction to build the franchise that all of us know that we want to build,” Warren said Monday at Halas Hall.

Bears fans, who have heard this before, are hopeful Warren will be right.

The Bears are just beginning their search for a new head coach. Warren and general manager Ryan Poles fired head coach Matt Eberflus on Friday. They promoted offensive coordinator Thomas Brown to interim head coach for the final five games of the 2024 season.

[ Chicago Bears fire head coach Matt Eberflus following baffling loss in Detroit on Thanksgiving ]

Brown is the 18th head coach in franchise history and the sixth since George McCaskey took over as team chairman in 2011.

Speaking Monday for the first time since firing Eberflus on Friday, Warren said he and Poles will run the coaching search “in tandem,” but that Poles will be “the point person.” As GM, Poles will have final say on hiring a coach, but Warren is going to be heavily involved in the process.

Here are the main takeaways from Monday’s news conference at Halas Hall in Lake Forest.

What are the Bears looking for in a coach?

Warren is pretty confident that coaches across the NFL will be lining up to interview at Halas Hall.

“This will be the most coveted job in the National Football League this year,” Warren said.

The only other current openings are with the New York Jets and the New Orleans Saints, but a few more jobs are likely to open once the regular season ends in January. Last year’s cycle featured eight head coach openings.

“It starts with a foundation and making sure we identify what we want to come in here and help us win championships,” Poles said Monday. “And then casting a wide net and taking as much time as we need to find the best candidate.”

Warren threw out plenty of buzzwords when discussing what he’s looking for in a coach: tough, demanding, bright, has a high attention to detail, a decisive decision maker.

The Bears have only just begun this process. Poles said the team hasn’t decided if it will use the help of an outside search firm or any sort of search committee. When the Bears hired Poles and Eberflus in 2022, they used a five-person search committee that included one person from outside the organization.

The process for finding a new head coach cannot begin in earnest for five more weeks. The NFL has numerous rules for how teams can conduct their searches. The interview process with current NFL coaches employed by other teams cannot begin until after the regular season. In-person interviews cannot begin until after the divisional round of the playoffs (Jan. 20).

Those rules do not address current college coaches. It appears the Bears could interview college coaches or unaffiliated coaches (such as Bill Belichick) immediately.

Why make a change now?

If the Bears can’t truly begin their search for five weeks, why make a change now?

It appears the Thanksgiving Day debacle against Detroit was the final straw for the players. The players went into the post-game locker room believing they had given it all but that their head coach made some critical late-game errors.

“I feel like we did enough as players to win the game,” veteran receiver Keenan Allen said after Thursday’s loss in Detroit.

This wasn’t the first time Eberflus botched an end-of-game scenario. An accumulation of things had grown and grown over the course of the season. Poles could not sit by and watch it happen any longer.

“It’s important always to have a pulse of the locker room,” Poles said Monday.

In the end, Eberflus made too many late-game, time-management errors.

“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.”

Warren noted that the Bears could’ve handled Eberflus’ firing better Friday. The coach met with members of the media on a Zoom call at 9 a.m. Friday before the team fired him about two hours later. At that point, Warren said, no final decision had been made.

The timing of the Zoom call put Eberflus in an awkward spot.

“In retrospect, could we have done it better? Absolutely, and I’ll be the first one to raise my hand, yes,” Warren said.

What does this mean for Caleb Williams?

For the third time in recent years, the Bears will be hiring a head coach less than a year after drafting a quarterback in the first round. The Bears drafted Mitchell Trubisky in 2017, then hired Matt Nagy in 2018. They drafted Justin Fields in 2021, then hired Eberflus in 2022.

Now, whoever the Bears hire will inherit rookie quarterback Caleb Williams, the No. 1 overall draft pick in April. Williams will have three more seasons on his contract beyond this year, plus the team has an option to add one more season in 2028 at a higher salary.

Poles called the development of his rookie quarterback “critical.” Making sure that there’s a plan for the quarterback will be “a major part of the interview process,” Poles said.

“We’ve seen his growth through some situations that we’ve had so far,” Poles said. “We’ve always got to keep that in mind and we’re going to make sure, again, we go back to what’s best for the Bears. His development is critical, so we need to make sure there’s alignment in that space so he can continue to get better.”

Can Poles get it right?

Warren made it clear that he fully supports Poles moving forward. At 39 years old, the GM is in his third year on the job and he has grown into the role.

“I’ve learned a lot over the last few years,” Poles said.

Warren didn’t hire Poles in 2022 (Warren showed up a year later), but he believes in his young GM. Poles has made some dramatic decisions. Trading the No. 1 pick in 2023 was not a move that every team would’ve made, but it helped Poles land the pick that led him to Williams a year later. There have been some misses along the way, too (trading for Chase Claypool; signing Nate Davis).

Poles is responsible for hiring Eberflus. That situation, however, was much different than this one. As a 36-year-old, first-time GM, Poles hired Eberflus 48 hours after taking the job. The Bears’ five-person search committee already had interviewed numerous head coaching candidates and had narrowed its list prior to hiring Poles.

This time, Poles will be running point. That being said, Warren is going to be heavily involved. The team president believes that together they will come to a consensus.

“We will be in contact, just like we were over the last 72 hours, in contact hours a day,” Warren said. “We will spend multiple hours a day until we make this hire. So from a final-say standpoint, I mean, ultimately, he’s the general manager, but I think in working together it’ll be very clear who’s the right person for the Chicago Bears.”