Matt Eberflus’ coaching roots all lead back to Toledo

A teenaged Matt Eberflus felt skeptical about Rob Rose’s proposal.

As a junior during the 1986 season, Eberflus had a tremendous year as a starting safety for Whitmer High School in Toledo, Ohio. Now, his defensive coordinator wanted him to change positions for his senior season. Rose envisioned a move to linebacker. Whitmer had graduated some good linebackers in recent years, and there was a hole at the position ahead of the 1987 season.

“He played a strong safety-type position,” Rose said of Eberflus. “Really good. Always a great hitter.”

Eberflus initially wasn’t keen on the idea. He wanted to play in college. A position change ahead of his senior year might not be the best thing for his future.

Rose told Eberflus to trust him. At 6-foot-2, about 210 pounds, Eberflus had the size for the position. If it wasn’t working out during two-a-days, Rose told Eberflus, he’d move him right back.

“He took me under his wing that whole offseason,” Eberflus told Shaw Local. “I’d do weights, then I’d do football. Then I’d do weights, and football. He was teaching me and teaching me and teaching me. That’s when I fell in love with coaching.”

Whitmer went to the state semifinals that season. Eberflus earned All-State honors.

“Obviously, it worked really, really well and he had a great year,” Rose said.

‘He wanted to stay close to home’

New Bears head coach Matt Eberflus and Toledo, Ohio, are intertwined. It’s the town where he grew up, it’s the town where he went to college and played Division I football, and it’s the town where he began his coaching career and worked for eight seasons.

“It’s our home,” Toledo native George Bardwell said. “It’s where your support system is. It’s comfortable, it’s safe.”

Brothers George and Tony Bardwell spent most days with their third cousin Matt growing up. The two families lived just a few miles apart. Eberflus’ mom, Joanne, worked part-time in retail and his dad, Stan, was an electrician.

The boys spent their childhoods outdoors. Basketball, baseball, tennis, hockey. It was always outside and there was always a score.

“There was a winner or loser, and it had to be physical in some way, shape or form,” George Bardwell said.

Eberflus took sports seriously. He was never afraid of the hard work. Back then, the dream was – as with any kid – to play in the NFL. Coaching wasn’t on any of their minds.

The Bardwell brothers and Eberflus all played on the 1987 Whitmer team that reached the state semifinals. It’s still among the best teams in school history.

After high school, Eberflus had a scholarship offer to play at Kent State. But he wanted to stay home. His home town had its own Division I football program, and he wanted to play for it. The problem was, Toledo head coach Dan Simrell didn’t have a scholarship for him.

“He wanted to stay close to home and he felt he could play at Toledo, and he did,” former Whitmer head coach Pat Gucciardo said. “He showed it. He could play anywhere.”

Simrell was well acquainted with Whitmer High School. He had walked the halls many times on recruiting visits. His two sons, who were younger at the time, expected to attend Whitmer one day. Simrell grew up in the same West Toledo neighborhood where Eberflus grew up. In many ways, recruiting Toledo was recruiting home.

Simrell made it his program’s goal to recruit Toledo better than any other school in the Mid-American Conference. Nothing irked him more than seeing Toledo natives thrive at Miami-Ohio or Bowling Green or Ohio University.

“You talk about recruiting and other people had offered [Eberflus] and he said, ‘No, I’m going to play for the University of Toledo,’” Simrell said. “You think, Jiminy Christmas, how hard do you have to recruit him?”

Eberflus walked on at Toledo. It proved an even better surprise than Simrell expected.

The coach believed he was getting a tough, intense football player who was a good student off the field. But it was apparent quite early on that Eberflus was more than just a good football player.

“He was better, much better, as a player,” Simrell said. “He became a player much sooner than you would ever expect. When he came, he was – and he was on the field as a freshman and sophomore – he was an impact player at an early age on the practice field and in the games that he played.”

‘I really saw something special in that guy’

Simrell, who is now retired, coached Eberflus for two seasons at Toledo. The school fired him after the 1989 season, even though at the time he was the all-time winningest coach in program history.

In stepped an unproven head coach named Nick Saban. The 38-year-old Saban had previously been the defensive backs coach for the Houston Oilers. Saban and Eberflus spent only one season together, but it was an influential year. Eberflus referenced it during his introduction at Halas Hall in January.

“I got a chance to play for a guy my junior year that showed me how to come into an organization and change the culture and change the mindset,” Eberflus said of Saban.

In 1991, Saban went back to the NFL as the Cleveland Browns defensive coordinator under head coach Bill Belichick. After Saban left, Toledo hired Saban’s Kent State college teammate Gary Pinkel to take over the program. Eberflus, a senior, went from walk-on to team captain to all-conference.

Pinkel remembered Eberflus as a team player who was always positive. His teammates liked him. He wouldn’t have been a captain if they didn’t.

“He’s a really good person, but then there’s a side of him that is tremendously competitive,” Pinkel said.

Soon after his senior season, Eberflus visited with Pinkel asking about becoming a graduate assistant on staff. Pinkel had learned under former Kent State and Washington coach Don James. He considered James a mentor. Pinkel, who is retired now, sees a lot of parallels in his relationship with James and his relationship with Eberflus.

“I never thought I would look at it this way, you know?” Pinkel said. “It’s been kind of neat because I really saw something special in this guy and it’s all coming to the top now.”

Eberflus coached at Toledo with Pinkel from 1992-2000, at various times coaching outside linebackers, defensive backs and serving as recruiting coordinator. When Pinkel left Toledo to become the head coach at Missouri, he brought Eberflus as his defensive coordinator. Eberflus excelled in that role from 2001-08. Missouri went from a struggling afterthought to one of the top programs in the Big 12 and in the country.

Eberflus had an opportunity to jump to the NFL after the 2008 season as the Cleveland Browns’ linebackers coach. Pinkel’s advice was this: “If you’re going to do this, you’ve got to be all in.”

He’s been all in ever since.

A decade later, he has worked his way up to head coach of the Chicago Bears. The Toledo coaching community kept a close eye on developments every January, when Eberflus’ name would come up in head coach discussions.

George Bardwell now owns a restaurant in Toledo, Whiskey & the Wolf. Everybody was buzzing when the Bears hired Eberflus. Bardwell called it “surreal.”

“He’s always been a dedicated, intense student of the game,” Bardwell said. “He loves the game and you can tell by the intensity in his eyes when he talks about it.”

Only 32 of these jobs exist in the world, and Toledo’s own Matt Eberflus holds one of them.

“Here’s a quality kid who stuck to it,” Simrell said. “There’s a lot of bumps in the road. How do you get there? Dips and turns and everything like that. You put your time in. And he’s done that.”

‘We did that stuff at Whitmer’

Behind every good football coach is half a dozen coaches who influenced them.

All these years later, that offseason with Whitmer assistant coach Rob Rose still stands out to Eberflus. The principles that Rose taught him still influence the way Eberflus teaches his players, and the way he will teach the Bears.

Because the Colts were featured in HBO’s “Hard Knocks in Season” last year, Rose made sure to tune in to look for Eberflus. One segment featured Eberflus’ “Ball Hawk” T-shirts. Whenever a Colts player created a turnover, he earned a Ball Hawk shirt, which Eberflus gave to him during a team meeting the following week.

“We did that stuff at Whitmer,” Rose said. “Now we think sometimes that’s too corny to do, but then I turn ‘Hard Knocks’ on and he’s giving it to the pro guys and they wanted it, they really wanted to get the T-shirts.”

Even after 52 years, Rose is still coaching. He’s now at Toledo Central Catholic, a fierce rival of Whitmer’s. A number of years back, a football coaching clinic stopped at a downtown Toledo hotel. Rose couldn’t quite remember the year, but it was probably when Eberflus was at Missouri.

Rose made sure to grab a seat in the front row for a lecture on defense. The speaker was none other than Toledo’s own Matt Eberflus.

“I’m a high school coach,” Rose said. “The things I get the most enjoyment out of, really, is seeing kids go on and do better things after they leave. So, of course, something like that makes you feel good.”

Eberflus was back in Toledo, standing in front of dozens of coaches, teaching the game he loves. He was home.