When the Matt Nagy era is all said and done in Chicago -- perhaps sometime around 10 a.m. Monday -- we’ll all start to look back on the handful of his defining games and the snapshots we remember them by.
There was Jared Goff, looking clueless – and frigid – throughout Vic Fangio’s electric pièce de résistance against the Rams on a Sunday night in 2018. There was Eddie Jackson a week later, hobbling off the field with an Aaron Rodgers interception in one hand and the NFC North title in the other. There was Eddy Piñeiro running 70 yards down field, arms spread wide after hitting his game-winning 53-yard field goal in Denver. And then there was Staley the mascot, face down on the frozen dirt behind Soldier Field’s north end zone after Cody Parkey’s double-doink. It’s not that those games will define any aspect of Nagy's tenure in Chicago – we already know how that conversation goes – but that doesn’t mean they’re pointless either. There will be games, no matter how underwhelming the Nagy-led Bears were, that will never be forgotten. Sunday just wasn't one of them.
“When you get into any sport, any profession, you look at it and you say, ‘You know, we all have to have a little dignity and pride into what we do,'" Nagy said after one of the weirder wins of his coaching career, a 25-24 victory against the Seahawks in a snow game slugfest. “It’s not easy when you lose. Trust me, I have been on a lot of football teams in my life, and there’s not many that I have been on where you have a losing record. So, you know even for me learning how to be on a team that has a losing record isn’t easy, but you gotta be able to persevere, you gotta fight and you have to be able to give it everything you have and have no regrets.”
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There’s not going to be a lot of credit given to Nagy in the coming days, so I’ll do it now: His teams always could take one on the chin. That’s a testament to Nagy, who's by most accounts a good guy but by all accounts in over his head. There will be other chances for him, in the NFL or otherwise, to land on his feet, and my guess is he will. He is, after all, probably going to end up losing his job with a winning overall record. “Playing hard” is about as passive-aggressive and backhanded a compliment as you can get in professional football, but the Bears did seem to genuinely stay engaged, even during some ugly fourth quarters against the Packers. There are worse ways to leave a football team.
“Coach Nagy’s an amazing coach and even a better person,” running back David Montgomery said. “I feel like everybody kind of gets this weird, this bad depiction of who he is. But he’s also, he’s actually a great guy and a great coach. And ever since I’ve been on the Bears, day in and day out, he’s always emptied his cup. And yesterday, his speech was, ‘No matter how it may look like, no matter what the record may look like, empty your cup. Whether it’s half-full or it’s full, empty it all out and don’t have no regrets doing it.”
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There was a certain ironic poetry to the way that the Bears beat the Seahawks on Sunday. Like, of course it was led by Nick Foles, the quarterback whom Nagy *had* to have in the 2019 offseason. Of course Foles threw the ball more, in a historically rare Seattle snow storm, than Montgomery ran it. The Bears (5-10) moved the ball well during the limited amount of tempo offense, you say? Darnell Mooney got as many rushes as Khalil Herbert? Every bad habit was bailed out by Foles’ big … you know … energy. Honestly, the most surprising detail from the win may have been that Nagy wasn’t wearing a visor for it.
“Even these past couple of games, we didn’t come out victorious, but you could see the fight that everybody has had,” receiver Damiere Byrd said. “Obviously we would love to win more games. But to be able to come out there on a day like this — not ideal weather conditions — and obviously in a hostile environment in Seattle, to be able to come out here and fight the way we did — being down a possession late in the game and then being able to have that late drive, you could kind of see the core nucleus of this team.”
Next year (or week?), when the core nucleus of this team is being coached up by someone else, there won’t be a whole lot of interest in hindsight. Nagy’s time in Chicago was as unexceptional as his record (33-30 in the regular season, 0-2 in the playoffs) says it was, and most of the memories worth keeping all happened three years ago. But his teams went down swinging, which feels like a positive trait worth commending before it gets drowned out in the significantly meaner eulogies to come.
“When you lose, it’s really freaking hard,” Nagy said. “How do you learn from those moments? I’m taking a lot from these moments that we have. Right now, today, the only thing I’m proud and happy about is for those players in that locker room to be able to enjoy that win from tonight. They deserve it. For the coaches too. For me, I’m just proud to be a part of it.
“They’re gonna play hard. The last couple weeks, they’ve done that. It means a lot to me.”
Cam Ellis is a writer for 670 The Score and Audacy Sports. Follow him on Twitter @KingsleyEllis.