Who’s to blame for the Bears’ embarrassing loss to Chargers?

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: coming off a strong performance and a good win in Week 7 over the Raiders, the Matt Eberflus-led Chicago Bears were soundly defeated and couldn’t find a way to stack two victories in a row.

After each of the five wins this team has under Eberflus, they’ve gone on to lose their next contest by an average of 13.6 points. At 5-20, Matt Eberflus owns the worst winning record for a head coach in Chicago Bears history.

Rookie undrafted quarterback Tyson Bagent provided an exciting distraction for a little while, but reality had to set back in. This is a poorly coached team with deficiencies in several critical positions. The pass rush still isn’t getting to the quarterback, the offensive line (while improved) still has holes that can be exploited, playcalling remains spotty at best, and the franchise quarterback isn’t on this roster.

Against other bad teams who are also poorly coached, the Bears are competitive. But you don’t get to play the Broncos, Commanders, and Raiders every week. Something has to give. The playoffs were already virtually out of reach at 2-5, but at 2-6, it seems the Bears are officially in mock draft season, and it’s not even November.

The Chicago Bears have never fired a head coach in the middle of a season, but there has to be some point at which they would do it. The McCaskey family has to have a breaking point somewhere that would force them to end this silly tradition. A head coach with the franchise’s all-time worst win/loss record seems like an excellent candidate to be the first midseason termination.

After the Bears’ Week 3 loss to the Chiefs, I replaced my usual game balls post with “blame balls,” and while the loss to the Chargers wasn’t quite as bad, it still had that same feeling of a complete lack of competitiveness.

The Chargers are a talented team, but the Chicago Bears should have challenged them for at least the first half before things got out of hand.

Who gets the most blame? Let’s see.

Matt Eberflus

The Eberflus experiment is over, he’s not the Bears’ head coach of the future. You can’t blame talent anymore. The Bears have spent big money in free agency and high draft picks on defensive players since Eberlfus’ arrival, and it’s still a bad unit. You can have a bad offense and survive as a defensive head coach, but a lousy defense is unforgivable.

Luke Getsy

Talk about whiplash. Getsy dialed up a deep shot for Tyson Bagent right out of the gate, and it worked. It was a gutsy, excellent play call that Bagent and Darnell Mooney executed perfectly. The very next play was a return to amateur hour with his decision to run a jet sweep with punt returner Trent Taylor … the the left side of the Bears’ offensive line … and right at Khalil Mack.

Predictably, this play went nowhere. The Bears went 3-and-out after the big opening pass and never looked back.

Velus Jones

There is no reason for Jones to have a spot on this roster after Week 8’s humiliating performance. All he does is watch kickoffs sail into the endzone and drop passes. On Sunday night, he was at it again. When the Bears desperately needed a spark, Bagent dropped and unleashed a 40-yard pass into the endzone. Jones didn’t have a defender within 15 yards of him.

But Velus was Velus, he stumbled over his own feet and fell to his back. The ball still landed quite literally in his lap, but he couldn’t hang onto it.

He shouldn’t hold onto a roster spot any longer, either.

Tyson Bagent

Part of me doesn’t want to put Bagent in this piece. He’s an undrafted rookie quarterback, after all. Blaming a rookie quarterback for looking like a rookie quarterback seems silly.

He finished with 232 yards and a touchdown while completing 67% of his passes. But he had two bad interceptions and threw two more interceptable balls.

However, he was also robbed of two touchdowns (more on that in a moment), and the defense put the Bears in an early hole, precisely what I said they couldn’t do. It was a bad performance overall from Bagent, but he’s still loaded with potential.

The referees

I generally avoid blaming refs for bad outcomes. It’s a bad look, and refs are never perfect, but things felt egregious on Sunday night, especially in the first quarter.

On the aforementioned deep shot to Darnell Mooney, he was never touched by a Chargers defender when he fell to the ground. He got up and could have sprinted to the endzone, but the officials inexplicably blew the whistle, ending the play.

Just a few minutes after that, as the Bears drove into the red zone, Bagent completed a short pass to Cole Kmet with a defensive back draped over him. Kmet ran laterally as he fought to break free, but just as he got loose and darted for the endzone for what would have been another touchdown, the officials blew the play dead.

This comes just hours after the Arizona Cardinals game, in which their tight end was allowed to fight off tacklers for four seconds before he finally regained forward momentum and scored a touchdown.

The refs did not cost the Bears this game, let’s make that clear. But boy, did they rob Chicago of a few big moments.