Knowing that a report about his imminent firing had stirred the Chicago area into a frenzy Tuesday morning, Bears coach Matt Nagy walked into the media room at Halas Hall like it was any other day.
He arrived late, letting the story rage unfettered for an extra 16 minutes, then unfolded a piece of paper as he sat at the microphone.
A prepared statement?
Nope. Just the injury report and the practice schedule.
“And now we’ve just gotta get ready here for this game, get ready to rock n’ roll,” he concluded. “So with that I’ll go ahead and open it up to any questions.”
There was a barrage of them. And none of Nagy’s responses did anything to quell the storm swirling around him and the Bears as they prepare to visit the Lions on Thursday.
The organization also did nothing, opting against releasing a definitive statement or even leaking a rebuttal to a recognizable media outlet. The Bears were content, instead, to have Nagy swerve awkwardly through his press conference as they live-streamed it.
Even weirder, they let special teams coordinator Chris Tabor face the inferno at his regularly scheduled media session an hour before that.
The spark was a report from Patch.com, a suburban news website citing “a top source,” that said Nagy was informed Monday that he’d be fired after the game Thursday.
“That is not accurate,” Nagy said, adding that he hadn’t had any discussions on that subject with chairman George McCaskey, president Ted Phillips or general manager Ryan Pace.
Given Nagy’s history of dodgy answers, him denying a story isn’t enough to squash it.
And given how dysfunctional and odd the organization is, that scenario is just goofy enough to be possible: The Bears break from their 101-year tradition of letting a head coach finish a season by pre-firing him four days in advance and can’t even keep it a secret for the first 24 hours.
Regardless of whether Nagy or Patch.com has more credibility in this standoff, speculation will continue — especially with the NFL’s new rule allowing teams to begin head-coaching interviews in Week 17.
And Nagy doesn’t seem to have gotten any guarantee that he’ll get to finish the season. When asked that directly, he tried to shift the topic.
“My focus right now is on these players and on Detroit,” he said. “That’s it. My job as a head coach and a leader is to do that.
“The only thing that we can do is focus on the now and try to do everything we can. Thursday is going to be here quickly, and we have one objective and that’s to win the game.”
It was a yes-or-no question.
“Again, it’s not something I’m focused [on],” he said. “I respect the question, but my focus is not on that.”
Beyond Halas Hall, though, everyone is preoccupied by it. In fact, they’re more ravenous for change than ever after Nagy dragged the Bears through a 16-13 loss to Baltimore on Sunday.
The exasperation has grown since Nagy’s dazzling debut in 2018, when the Bears went 12-4 and won the NFC North for their first playoff berth in eight years.
Since then, he has gone 19-23, careening through a four-game losing streak in 2019 and a six-game plunge last season. The Bears are 3-7 and on a five-game slide heading into the Lions game.
Four seasons in, the Bears are still waiting for Nagy to deliver on his reputation as an offensive mastermind and quarterback guru. They’ve scored the fourth-fewest points per game and gained the second-fewest yards per play.
Those are the reasons, along with various other debacles, why any report about Nagy getting fired would instantly be received as plausible. His trail of missteps is what led to him sitting at the podium two days before a game to fight off a rumor that’s about to be sent out the door.
