DETROIT — The Bears are a punchline yet again, and the sports media world feasted on coach Matt Eberflus’ mismanagement at the end of their 23-20 loss to the Lions on Thursday.
As the clock wound down and the Bears tried to tie or win the game, it ended on an incomplete pass from rookie quarterback Caleb Williams as time expired. Eberflus allowed the clock to wind from 32 seconds to six between plays and left the game with one timeout unused.
“In 70 years of coaching, I’ve never seen dysfunction that cost a team an opportunity to win the game,” Johnson said on the Fox studio show after the game. “He’s got a rookie quarterback, and different teams do it different ways. I handled clock management and timeouts. Sometimes the quarterback and coach do it. Sometimes the coach has a coach in the box talking to him about clock management.
“But when Eberflus saw they were off track and there was dysfunction, he should’ve called timeout.”
The loss was the Bears’ sixth in a row, dropping them to 4-8 this season and Eberflus to 14-32 in his tenure.
Explaining a confounding, mystifying finish to a frustrating loss isn’t getting any easier for the Bears, no matter how many times they have to do it. “We keep coming back in these games and [have] time to actually win … and we just [bleep] the bed,” DJ Moore said.
When the teams ran into the locker room at halftime, the Lions had run a whopping 47 plays for 279 yards — 144 on the ground and 135 in the air.
A look at three key points in the Bears’ 23-20 loss to the Lions on Thanksgiving.