Under Eberflus, Bears were terrible at clock management. Here's how Thomas Brown, Caleb Williams can fix it

LAKE FOREST – Chicago Bears interim head coach Thomas Brown made his 4 p.m. flight from Chicago to Charlotte on Friday. The coach hadn’t seen his family in six weeks.

Despite taking over as head coach of the Bears just hours earlier, Brown went home for a much-needed break. His mind, however, remained focused on his team.

“You could obviously guess there were some thoughts going through my brain,” Brown said.

Over the weekend, he reached out to every player on the team and expressed his excitement to be their head coach. He spoke with mentor Sean McVay, head coach of the Rams. He also set in motion a necessary reorganization among his coaching staff.

The No. 1 most important thing over these final five games remains the development of rookie quarterback Caleb Williams. With Brown taking over head coaching duties, he won’t have as much time to devote to the No. 1 overall draft pick. Brown, who served as offensive coordinator for three games before his latest promotion, needed to solidify the support structure around Williams.

For him, it made a ton of sense to promote wide receivers coach Chris Beatty to offensive coordinator. Brown and Beatty first worked together at Wisconsin in 2014. Brown will still call plays for the offense moving forward, but Beatty will be his right-hand man.

Maybe the biggest failing of Matt Eberflus' tenure was his inability to manage the clock in the waning seconds of the game. On more than one occasion this season – including the Thanksgiving Day game that ultimately sunk the Eberflus era – the Bears looked as if they didn’t know what they were doing as precious seconds ticked off the clock.

Brown has designated Beatty as his clock management guru. At previous stops along his coaching career, Beatty has done exactly that.

One of the first things that Thomas [Brown] and I talked about was how to streamline that and make it smoother."

—  Chris Beatty, Bears wide receivers coach

“We’ve talked about that,” Beatty said. “We have gone through the process of trying how we’re going to simulate that in a game and try to get that to where it’s not an issue and stay a play ahead. That’s part of the issue, is that we haven’t been ahead of the game. We’ve been a bit late.”

When first-time head coaches fail at clock management, it’s often because that was never their responsibility before. Eberflus had never been a head coach at any level. Even going back to year one in 2022, clock management was an issue.

Beatty spent eight years as a high school head coach two decades ago. At various stops along the way as a college and NFL coach, he has been in charge of clock management.

“Sometimes you take those things for granted when you worked with Matthew Stafford or Justin Herbert,” said Beatty, who previously worked with Herbert and the Chargers. “They’ve been through those situations, whereas Caleb is going through a lot of these for the first time. It’s our job to make it easier for him.”

That’s what a coaching staff should do. It’s where Eberflus failed in the final seconds in Detroit.

Certainly Williams is partly to blame for the way the final minute went down in Detroit. Quarterbacks coach Kerry Joseph said it will be a learning moment for the young quarterback.

“He’s always going to remember that and he’s always going to learn from that,” Joseph said. “I always talk about RAM – repetition and mistakes. Alright? [The sack on the previous play] wasn’t a mistake by him, but that’s a repetition that he’s always going to remember and he’s always going to remind himself: ‘If I’m ever in that situation again, I know how to handle it.‘"

This week, Williams said he should’ve had more urgency getting his teammates lined up for the final play.

On top of that, he said he needed to understand the situation better. It didn’t have to be a do-or-die moment. Williams didn’t need to toss a deep pass toward Rome Odunze in the end zone.

“[It’s] just being on the same page of just what the situation was, being on the same page of what we’re actually going to do,” Williams said.

Joseph noted that the coaching staff “can help him out in that situation.” That’s exactly what Brown and Beatty intend to do moving forward.