Matt Nagy studied at the feet of Andy Reid, whose 22-4 record after the bye as coach of the Eagles and Chiefs remains one of the marvels of the NFL.
Yet by his fourth season with the Bears, Nagy knew he couldn’t replicate Reid’s success just by implementing the same routine during the team’s week off.
“I tried to follow that early on in my career, and it did not work,” he said in 2021.
Nagy would lose to the Ravens and backup quarterback Tyler Huntley later that week, bringing his Bears record after the bye to 0-4. He wasn’t alone. His predecessor, John Fox, went 0-3 after the week off. The man who would take Nagy’s place, Matt Eberflus, went 1-2 after byes.
The Bears have spent nine months touting new coach Ben Johnson as something different. One way to prove it is to beat the Commanders on Monday night after having an extra week to prepare.
Johnson’s reputation as one of the league’s premier play-callers has been reinforced by his offense’s performances after the bye. In his last two seasons as the Lions’ offensive coordinator, Johnson hung 88 points the week after the bye, beating the Cowboys by 38 and the Chargers by three.
Those two wins are as many as the Bears have had in the same situation since they hired Marc Trestman in 2013. While the rest of the league used the week off to recharge and fine-tune their gameplans, Trestman, Nagy, Fox and Eberflus went 2-10 in the week following a bye. That’s tied with the Jets for the worst record in the NFL. The Bears’ point differential of minus-96 is the second-worst in the league, too, behind the Jets.
Most teams are above average with an extra week to prepare — only nine teams other than the the Bears have worse than a .500 record. Only four have less than five wins.
The Bears spent the last week trying to figure out how to stop the run and how to block for it. Perfecting the play of quarterback Caleb Williams, though, is the fastest path to post-bye success, both in the short and long terms. Former offensive coordinator Shane Waldron thought he had the rookie quarterback on the right path last year when the Bears took their break following three-straight wins — and an aggregate score of 95-44 during those games.
Williams went 4-2 in the six games before the Bears’ Week 7 bye last year, posting an 88.7 passer rating, nine touchdowns and five interceptions and being sacked 20 times.
In the three games following the Bears’ bye, Williams posted a 64.7 passer rating. He didn’t throw a single touchdown and was sacked 18 times. The Bears lost all three games, the first on the Tyrique Stevenson “Fail Mary,” then in lay-down defeats to the Cardinals and Patriots. They went on to lose 10-straight games. Williams can’t afford to lose momentum during his week off the way he did last year.
The Lions had a bye in Week 5 last year, so Johnson knows the perks — and the challenges — of taking the week off so soon. Having the league’s earliest bye week has reinforced in Williams the need to gird himself for the rest of the season.
“Being able to come in [to Halas Hall] and make sure my body is right, make sure my mind is right …” the quarterback said. “Work on my body, make sure that it’s ready for the stretch of games. We have 13 after this. So, just being able to prepare, take a day off or so and let my mind rest a little bit.”
Johnson called it the Week 5 break “good thing for us” because the coaching staff was able to get a feel of who the Bears were over the first four weeks
“What we do well, and what we can sink our teeth into,” he said. “And whether we want to pivot a little bit in certain spots, whether that’s personnel-driven or schematic, that can get us better going ahead.”
He’ll unveil what his coaching staff discovered on Monday, when players return to Halas Hall. Then he’ll try to do what few Bears coaches have accomplished in the last dozen years.