Jim O'Donnell: Was the Bears' brief weekend in London the beginning of the end for Nagy?
WHEN INVESTIGATORS from The National Transportation Safety Board arrive in Lake Forest to begin sifting through the debris of The Matt Nagy Era, here's a date to focus on:
Oct. 6, 2019.
That was the fateful Sunday when Nagy and the Bears played Jon Gruden and the Raiders at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London.
Going into the contest, Nagy was reigning NFL Coach of the Year. The two-year regular-season record of his Bears was a sterling 15-5.
They lost that British evening, 24-21.
Since that kickoff, Nagy's bobbleheads are 17-25.
Mere coincidence or a telling Queen's pitch into a football hell?
SOME BACKGROUND FACTS:
• The coalescing defense of the Bears was still getting to know coordinator Chuck Pagano, who had replaced the wizardly Vic Fangio the previous January;
• Khalil Mack was playing his first game vs. the Raiders — the outfit that had allowed him to depart Oakland 14 months before, producing a projection of fury that assisted in surging the Bears into 6½-point favorites;
• Improbable wonder boy Mitch Trubisky was out with a dislocated shoulder, so career plumber Chase Daniel started at QB for the Bears.
SOME NOTABLE ODDITIES and other Holmesian bric-a-brac:
• Second-year LB Roquan Smith had mysteriously missed the Bears previous game — a 16-6 win over visiting Minnesota — for “personal reasons” that still remain just that;
• Gruden, singed by a 27-3 loss to the Seahawks at Wembley Stadium the previous autumn, had his Raiders fly directly from a game at Indianapolis the previous Sunday to London;
• The Bears — presumably after all due consideration by top-level decision-makers including George McCaskey and Ryan Pace — rolled into London a full four days after Oakland, on Friday.
GAME FACTS:
• Although hardly a juggernaut, Derek Carr and the less jet-lagged Raiders led 17-0 at the half;
• Daniel and the Bears responded with a 21-point third quarter and were ahead 21-17 entering the final 15 minutes;
• In a remarkable foretelling of all The Nagy Era has disintegrated into, Gruden's gang somehow plugged together a 15-play, 93-yard drive that culminated when Josh Jacobs hurdled into the London air with 1:57 remaining for the winning TD.
CONCLUSIONS AND OTHER CHICAGO SPORTS MYSTICISM:
• Chicago team “eras” have been known to flip on a single event.
Leo Durocher and the 1969 “Black Cat Game” at Shea Stadium — which actually featured a trained feline named Choo Choo from Queensborough Casting — is one example.
Dick Motta, Chet Walker and The Mother's Day Meltdown of 1975 in the NBA Western Conference Finals against Golden State is another.
Anything Jeremy Colliton touched would be a third;
• Nagy was young magic personified when his Bears deplaned at London's Heathrow Airport. The genie has never stayed out of his coaching bottle ever since;
• NFL or otherwise, it's a hard world to sustain a break in.
That will undoubtedly be part of the final NTSB report from Lake Forest.
STREET-BEATIN': The pairing of Tiger Woods and son Charlie Woods produced NBC's highest ratings for the PNC Championship since 2000 (Although young Charlie's request that half of the match be played on Xbox seemed a bit extreme.) ...
The People magazine report that Aaron Rodgers and fiancee Shailene Woodley have “a nontraditional” relationship should be of surprise to no one north of Pleasant Prairie. Hasn't it been that way between Rodgers and the Green Bay front office for years? ...
WSCR-AM (670) morning glory Mike Mulligan is giving off subtle signs that change could be straight ahead. (At The Sun-Times Classic, Mulligan was considered amiably chatty; ex-roster mate Terry Boers was listed as hollow and wuthering.) ...
Two sports talk stations cracked the latest national list of Top 10 billing and neither was in Chicago: No. 6 WBZ-FM ($29.6M) of Boston and No. 10 WFAN ($28M) of NYC. Mike Thomas came to ESPN-AM (1000) for an upstreaming two-year run from WBZ; He's now back in Boston competing against the market leader as chief of Audacy's six-station group. ...
Father Terry Keehan of Holy Family will be celebrating Christmas Masses “hurt” at the Inverness parish this weekend. He aggravated an old back injury that has roots extending to his star basketball days alongside Tony Thompson at St. Viator High (Class of ‘74). ...
Straightforward tease on Cleveland's ESPN-AM (850) prior to Monday afternoon's COVID-decimated Browns-Raiders game: “We don't know who the players will be. We do know the Browns will be playing the Raiders Monday at 5.” (The last-second FG of LV's Daniel Carlson was a bone crusher in The Dawg Pound.) ...
And from the feinting-with-damned-praise file, a Tuesday morning headline in The Minneapolis Star-Tribune: “Vikings stagger their way past bumbling, fumbling Bears for needed victory.”
• Jim O'Donnell's Sports & Media column appears Thursday and Sunday. Reach him at jimodonnelldh@yahoo.com.