In any professional sport, management is accountable to ownership and players are accountable to coaches and coaches are accountable to management.
Such is the circle of life in pro sports.
Until you cover the Chicago Bears.
A Super Bowl expectation pre-season has turned into a Toilet Bowl of reality.
No one seems to be in charge. No seems to be listening. No one seems to know what to do to correct things. No one seems to take responsibility for their actions.
The latest madness from Halas Hall is that four hours after Coach Trestman told the media that it was not all Cutler's fault for the offensive woes, Cutler is benched for Jimmy Clausen, a player who has not taken this year a first team practice snap.
It could have been the only time that the organization decided to slap their mumbly, pouting franchise quarterback for his poor performances with some accountability, but it seems a little and too late. Management put $54 million guaranteed on the Cutler bandwagon at the beginning of the year when the team did not have to do so. Cutler has a reputation as being a "coach killer" for good reason; look at the graveyard of past offensive coordinators.
The free fall from firing a 10-6 Lovie Smith to a lackluster 8-8 season to now a potential 5-11 disaster, the Trestman era may go down as one of the worst in franchise history. A franchise that has only won 2 championships in the last 51 years. No doubt the reason Smith was fired was because he did not get to the playoffs. But behind the scenes, Smith was welding too much power and control over personnel decisions. He was solely focused on his defense, an arrogantly outdated Tampa 2 scheme that former Bear Gary Fencik called "high school." But still, Smith's players played hard for him, and they won games.
GM Phil Emery went out of the box thinking when he hired a CFL coach in Trestman. A report surfaced recently that NFL Coach of the Year, Bruce Arians, who guided the Colts to the playoffs during a turmoil year when their head coach was battling cancer, wanted the Bears job. But when it came time to interview, Arians was told he had to go through a "fake" news conference drill, and was also told he could not hire any of his assistant coaches. Arians had dealt with the media under pressure for an entire year. It seemed like Bears management was clueless in how to interview an experienced NFL coach. But based upon the amount of control management wanted to keep, no wonder the Bears hired Trestman, a man with no NFL experience to leverage concessions on his staff.
Trestman was hired to do one thing: fix the offense. So management brought in the worst defensive coordinator from the previous season, Mel Tucker, but told him to "keep" the Lovie Smith defense so as not to offend the returning players. It should not have mattered to the players - - - professionals have to be professional and change with the times. But to hand tie Tucker was also another management intrusion and mistake.
Trestman was supposed to be a quarterback guru. He could fix Cutler's bad mechanics, bad reads, and turnover issues. The team surrounded him with All-Pro caliber wide receivers, running back and tight end. All the pieces were in place for a juggernaut offense.
But this year, the offense regressed to being middle of the pack poor. The team comes out of the gate so poorly in the first half of games that even national commentators are baffled. The team, with all the garbage points at the end of losses, still has not scored more than 28 points this season.
The head coach is responsible to get his players and the three phases of the team ready for each game. Clearly, offense, defense and special teams have been awful. Unprepared, lack of urgency, poor fundamentals and inability to play their positions are damning problems that have not been corrected week after week. Some say the players are not that talented - - - so that goes to the general manager. But he spent a ton of money on "name" free agents to shore up the lines. He made the disastrous investment in Cutler.
If anyone wants to study "How not to Run a Sports Franchise," one only has to review the Bears' 2014 season.
