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Bears need to drop Lovie Smith now
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November 8, 2009
BY MIKE MULLIGAN Columnist
The head coach of a football team has a weird job. He’s the man in charge and the unquestioned ruler of his world, but the real power belongs to the players. A coach’s minions determine his fate--his subjects control the length of his reign--if a crop fails, the king is to blame. If the defense fails, the defensive coordinator is to blame.
All of which leaves Bears coach Lovie Smith with nowhere to hide following Arizona’s crushing 41-21 victory over the Bears on Sunday at Soldier Field. Is it the players fault that the defense couldn’t come close to stopping the Cardinals? Was it a fault in scheme? Is it the play-calling? No matter the answer, just one man is responsible for this debacle--the guy wearing the crown. And the emperor was unclothed on this day.
The loss falls directly at the feet of Smith, the man who once uttered a famous eulogy on Ron Rivera’s career as defensive coordinator saying: ``You should trust me as the head football coach to put us in the best position to win games.’’
Do Smith’s own players even trust him at this point? They look like they have quit on him. How else to you explain Tommie Harris being kicked out four plays into a game for throwing a punch? Harris clearly doesn’t respect his teammates or fear his coach. Heck, even the quarterback picked up a 15-yard personal foul for unsportsmanlike conduct. Do the Bears need to give him another contract extension as a form of hush money to keep him from speaking his mind? The Bears were whistled for nine penalties covering 89 yards. Arizona had two for 15 yards. Team discipline is on the coach.
The Bears have never fired a head coach in season, and for months we’ve heard that Smith has job security because he’s owed $10 million-plus for the next two years. None of that matters now. For the second time in three weeks a team has scored at will on Smith’s once implacable defense. Cincinnati scored on its first seven possessions en route to beating the Bears 45-10 on Oct. 25, but at least that was on the road.
The Cardinals robbed the Bears of their last bit of dignity by embarrassing them at home. They scored on their first six possessions, including four straight touchdowns to open the game, along with a 43-yard field goal at the end of the half after the Bears had a field goal blocked with 22 seconds left. Not bad for a team without three-time Pro Bowl receiver Anquan Boldin.
If the problem is the defense then the defensive coordinator has to go. If the defensive coordinator is the head coach, boy, do the Bears have a major credibility problem.
Smith preached patience in his post-game interview, using his tired metaphor of the quarters of a football game to measure a team’s success. The team that went 3-1 to open the season is suddenly 4-4 at halftime and heading for a free fall with San Francisco on Thursday, followed by a home game with Philadelphia and a date at Minnesota before the next game they will be favored in at home to St. Louis on Dec. 6. How does the coach keep his players from being completely disillusioned at this point?
``You look at reality, to me, and we're 4-4,’’ Smith said. ``That's all you can look at. We're 4-4. We haven't played the defending champs in our division. We have a lot of important football games coming up. You're disappointed in today, which we are, but then you move forward and you just do everything you can to get a win the next time out, and that's what we'll do.’’
The role of any coach in any sport is to stay ahead of the game. It’s the only way to keep players in a position to win. Again, the Bears have a terrible problem with their signature defense, the Cover-2. Arizona converted their first eight third downs, seemingly completing passes at will in the opening half.
``Coach Smith has been putting in and working all those hours and we can’t go out there and play the way we did,’’ safety Danieal Manning said. ``We have to step up, man. I am quite sure if he was out there he would be playing hard. We have to dig down and pick it up. We HAVE to pick it up.’’
Smith is in a terrible trick bag because if the problems on the team are due to personnel--if the team is physically inferior to its opponents and therefore out of its league--then why was the off-season strategy to simply change coaches and mentor your way to glory? If the scheme is flawed, if the thing the Bears are built to play has simply been found out by the league, then how do you go about repairing it?
The Cincinnati game was supposed to be an aberration, an abnormality of regression that would never happen again, not under Smith’s iron-fisted rule. Now the coach who was once widely respected by his team--that’s going back a few years--can’t seem to hold their focus or attention. Two out of three games have been embarrassments for the defense. That’s a pattern that will ruin the reputation of the man in charge.
``It’s all the players, it’s not the coaching,’’ defensive end Alex Brown said. ``They make the right calls. They make good calls...for about five minutes during that game, we actually believed we could win it. We played like it. Why can’t we do that from the first play? That’s what we have to figure out.’’
It’s true. Players actually win and lose games, but the coach is the man responsible and when he’s powerless to correct the problems, he’s finished.
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