(670 The Score) Now-former Bears head coach Matt Eberflus hoped to set a positive, uplifting tone last Thursday in the visitors’ locker room at Ford Field in the wake of his team's sixth consecutive loss. Star cornerback Jaylon Johnson wasn’t willing to hear it.
On the Spiegel & Holmes Show on Monday, Johnson confirmed that he expressed his frustration with Eberflus, who was fired by the Bears on Friday morning.
“At some point, enough is enough, just as far as expressing frustrations,” Johnson said. “But at the end of the day, I found out through ESPN of the firing first, and then received some phone calls, texts after that. But at the end of the day, this isn’t my first go-around, this is not my first rodeo with firings. This is a business.
"Guys get fired all the time – players, coach, GM, it happens. I don't necessarily feel like I was just some major part that played a role in getting (Eberflus) fired. That's not on me. But at the end of the day, there was frustration, there were words from myself that I expressed just from my frustration of losing.
"Part of what I said after the game is I've been losing for five years. So, I mean, I feel like a high-level player like myself, after a certain point, losing games how we've been losing games, someone has to express something.
“It was one of those situations where it just got to that point where you don’t remember everything that was said.”
Johnson was frustrated with how the Bears' 23-20 loss to the Lions had just ended. With the Bears trailing by three, Eberflus refused to call the team's final timeout after rookie quarterback Caleb Williams was sacked at the Lions’ 41-yard line with about 32 seconds left, pushing his team to the edge of field-goal range. Eberflus instead saved the timeout, hoping the Bears could quickly run a play to pick up a few more yards to set up a game-tying field-goal attempt.
But the Bears were disorganized and didn’t take the next snap – a third-and-26 situation – until six seconds remained, at which point Williams threw an incompletion deep downfield as the clock hit zeroes.
It marked the fourth time in the Bears' ongoing six-game losing slide that the game went down to the final play. Eberflus was 14-32 in three-year Bears tenure, including 5-19 in one-score games.
A second-round pick in the 2020 NFL Draft, the 25-year-old Johnson has never been a part of a Bears team with a winning record.
“It was just based around frustrations of losing,” Johnson said. “That’s what triggered it. Just some certain things and seeing the way things had went these last few weeks. From the outside looking in, you can say it’s the last few weeks. For me, it’s the last five years of my damn career.
“I’m used to winning, used to playing the game at a high level, and I haven’t done that since I’ve been in a Bears uniform. For me, just expressing that frustration. It hasn’t been a lack of talent, especially this year. It’s not a lack of talent. It’s not any of those things where I can just say, ‘Well, we have a bad team, a bad roster.’ It’s just little things, certain situations, a certain way of losing that really hurts, and it just got to a point where I was fed up.”