It was easy for Thomas Brown to begin his tenure as Chicago Bears interim head coach preaching accountability.
It would have been easy, too, for Brown to simply voice the pillars importance and then demonstrate it at a later date.
This was just his first press conference as interim head coach, less than a month after he had been elevated to offensive coordinator in the wake of Shane Waldrons firing.
But Brown said he wanted his team to embody three abilities: coachability, accountability and dependability.
Thats all of us, myself included, he said Monday afternoon. Im not above coaching. Im not above accountability. We get that done together.
Then, he showed it.
Unprompted, before he opened the floor to questions, Brown brought up the teams recent end-of-game losses. The Bears lost to the Washington Commanders on a poorly defended Hail Mary in late October. Theyve lost their last three games by a combined seven points thanks to a blocked kick, overtime sputtering and mismanaged clock.
Matt Eberflus was an easy scapegoat after he was fired Friday. Brown didnt stop the accountability there.
I know theres a lot of scrutiny, talk, dialogue about whats happened at the end of some of these games, Brown said Monday. I am not exempt from responsibility in those actions.
The word team I believe in doing things together. We get rewarded together, we also get criticized together. So we will have an internal process well go through on a weekly basis to prepare ourselves for those opportunities. And on game day, well execute.
Dont panic, do a great job communicating, be poised in the moment, make a decision and roll with it.
On Thanksgiving, the Bears rallied from a 16-0 halftime deficit to outscore their division-rival Detroit Lions 20-7 in the second half. They then got the ball back with 3:31 to play, at their own 1-yard line.
Rookie quarterback Caleb Williams found receiver D.J. Moore for 25 yards on a third-and-7, and 21 on a fourth-and-4. Williams rebounded from one sack to scramble 14 yards and another to scramble 13. In all, the Bears moved 52 yards. But after a sack with 31 seconds to play, the Bears did not call a timeout. Williams attempted to hurry up his team as 4 yards stood between them and their expected target field-goal range. Instead, the clock expired on a missed pass to Rome Odunze. The Bears lost 23-20.
No field goal was even attempted.
Why?
Brown addressed the gaffe publicly and to his players.
“Like I told the offense this morning: Theres a lot of dialogue about those last couple plays, the last seconds, Brown said. I focus more on the events leading up to it the opportunities well before that moment to end the game, to finish the game.
So yes, its important for us to execute in those moments. But dont forget we had several opportunities throughout the game. We dug ourselves into a hole in the first half, battled back into that game [and] had several opportunities before that to go execute.
Brown modeled for his players what it means to confront mistakes made. He could have leaned on his earlier line that “nobody cares about what happened before, but a coach who preached its not about the event its about the response instead responded both by declining to throw Eberflus under the bus and by acknowledging his own role.
I wont get into the weeds of what was communicated, not communicated, because thats irrelevant, thats over with now, Brown said. But definitely had the opportunity to learn from it.
And I don’t remove myself from accountability in those scenarios.