(670 The Score) If Matt Nagy was knowingly coaching his last game with the Bears on Sunday, he could've fooled me. There were a whole lot of slow-developing, ill-advised fourth-down play calls for a guy supposedly working on borrowed time – although an uncompromising devotion to the status quo does sort of seem like a prerequisite at Halas Hall.
After the Bears' 31-17 loss to the Vikings in Minneapolis in their finale, Nagy spoke to the team about life lessons that could be taken away from a 6-11 season and ways in which his players can apply those to the offseason and beyond. It wouldn't be the first time that Nagy's well-meaning sentiment gets lost in sloppy execution, but this time, it might be the last.
"Whatever has happened in my four years here, good and bad, there's a reason for all of it," he said. "And even selfishly and individually for me, there's a reason why this is happening right now. When this stuff happens, like I told the guys in there, let this stuff right here refine you, not define you."
The bad news? Nagy will leave the Bears almost exactly the way he found them in 2018 – with 11 losses and one of the worst offenses in football. There's even worse news about which general manager presented him with that roster, but who really wants to get into all that right now? The good news is that the Bears aren't the New York Giants. They're not the Carolina Panthers either – or even the Vikings team they just lost to.
There's a foundation in Chicago that'll be appealing to most of the coaches on the job market; it's amazing what having a good quarterback can do. The Bears might need an exhaustive amount of body work, but at least they have an engine worth building around. (I'm not a car guy, I hope this makes sense.) For all the talk of losing veterans like receiver Allen Robinson and defensive lineman Akiem Hicks, players like quarterback Justin Fields, running back David Montgomery, receiver Darnell Mooney and linebacker Roquan Smith have provided plenty of much-needed hope that the days of pointless, season-ending blowouts in Minnesota quickly become a Nagy-era relic.
"The whole season? It's a lot of ups and downs," Mooney said. "Take this on as a learning experience – when you have downs, you've got to continue to push forward and a lot of things will come in different directions. You may never know where it may come from, so you just gotta be ready for anything and everything.
"It's just about every man looking himself in the mirror," Smith added. "I always live by that, and I think some other guys are adopting that as well. It's just about everybody being the best version of themselves and not looking for others to help them out in situations — 'Hey, give me the hard hat. I want this. I want that.' So go work for it and do your job. That's all it is, everybody has a job every single play."
Talking the talk is about all that Bears players can do right now, especially before the mandatory exit meetings that will take place at Halas Hall starting at 9 a.m. Monday. The fact that Mooney and Fields are headed down to Florida to (literally) start training immediately after those meetings is probably nothing more than a fun anecdote, but there's something to be said for the enthusiasm that the team's core – at least the ones who talked after the game – has about the direction the Bears are headed.
"Do you know what's going to happen tomorrow, Tuesday? I don't think anyone can answer what if, all the uncertainty," Smith said. "That's life. That's life. You don't know what's gonna happen tomorrow. Hey, we can all be here today, gone tomorrow. So we don't know. I don't live in that world. I live in the present, and that's how I'll always be and look forward and move forward."
Cam Ellis is a writer for 670 The Score and Audacy Sports. Follow him on Twitter @KingsleyEllis.
