Rozner: Bears don't exactly have Lazor focus in defeat
Some of us have been around long enough to remember when this was all the fault of John Fox.
Not to mention little Don Segretti.
But after more than two years of a putrid offense going back to the middle of 2018, which was Matt Nagy's first season here as Savior in Chief, he has finally given up the play-calling duties.
It didn't work Monday night against the Vikings at home, but quarterback Nick Foles and offensive coordinator Bill Lazor shouldn't really be the focus here.
Bill Lazor and Nick Foles? Wait, remember when Nagy and Mitch Trubisky were headed to the Hall of Fame? Yeah, that was like 15 minutes ago.
For six years of GM Ryan Pace, four years of Trubisky and three years of Nagy, the cheerleading has been so loud that you would have assumed the Bears had won multiple Super Bowls when - in fact - they have played 60 minutes of playoff football.
And that's the goal, right? The Super Bowl is the goal, yes?
Zoom out a bit and you have the right as a paying customer to remember that six years into this regime the Bears don't have an offensive line, a quarterback or a head coach who is willing to run the football.
The Bears also went into Week 10 as the most penalized team in the NFL with the worst clock management, but Nagy is young and hip and dances with his players postgame.
Remember that narrative? Nagy is a genius because he shakes his backside with his players when they win a game. That is a fabulous quality to have in an NFL coach.
So Lazor and Foles being terrible against the Vikings on Monday Night Football - and Foles being carted off in the last minute - is merely a distraction from the bigger issue.
The point of this exercise is to win it all, and the Bears have not come close in six years under this general manager, pending, of course, the outcome of the 2020 season.
Pace is not someone who quickly admits a mistake, which is how you wound up with Nagy calling plays and Trubisky still under center when this season began. It's why it takes him so long to give up on his draft picks.
Consider the Arizona Cardinals, who took QB Josh Rosen 10th in 2018, and then traded him after 13 starts and took Kyler Murray at No. 1 the following year. The Cards admitted a mistake and now have Murray playing at an MVP level.
They also fired head coach Steve Wilks after only one season, admitting another error.
Two years ago they were 3-13, and now Arizona has Kliff Kingsbury as the head coach, Murray playing out of this world, DeAndre Hopkins catching Hail Murrays, and if the Cards could muster any kind of defense they would be a serious threat to win it all.
Two years. Not six years. Two years.
It's easy to get bogged down in the week-to-week Trubisky misery, or now the week-to-week Nagy friction with Foles, which forced him to shelve his script and give Lazor a chance.
From Nagy and Trubisky to Lazor and Foles. See where we're going here? Not exactly Andy Reid and Pat Mahomes. Not quite a Super Bowl formula.
If the goal is to win it all, the McCaskey family has some serious decisions to make, and that has little to do with one game against the Vikings, one effort by Lazor to fix a broken offense, or even the potential return of Trubisky, assuming his right shoulder is healthy enough.
It's a question of whether the football people running this team are the right people, and whether six years is enough proof for ownership that they need to try something else.
Monday night's 19-13 loss, the Bears' fourth straight, dropped them to 5-5 and on the outside of the playoff picture - and without a healthy quarterback going into the bye week.
The season was a joke at 5-1, but now is teetering on the brink with two quarterbacks hurt and Lazor calling the plays, continuing to use Nagy's awful scheme.
The bigger picture is Pace promised that Nagy would fix all that Fox couldn't, that Trubisky would be a star and the Bears had a big future.
The question remains, when?