As we all wait for the Bears to name one of 2010’s hottest head coaching candidates to be their offensive coordinator in 2019, it’s worth taking a second to wonder how much it really matters in the first place. You could certainly make an argument that, actually, nothing matters anymore — a bit that weirdly enough never seems to land with my parents or my boss. Even among the waist-high pile of dumb offseason news and speculation, searching far and wide for Nagy 202’s (303? 101 again?) next TA feels especially pointless.

The general consensus seems to be that the outside candidates that best fit what the team is looking for are Pat Shurmer, Marty Mornhinweg, and maybe Mike Kafka. It wouldn’t be unrealistic to expect the Bears promote Dave Ragone or Brad Childress, either. I’ll give you a second now to settle down from all the overwhelming excitement you must be feeling in this moment.

This is not to say that on a macro level, hiring an offensive coordinator is pointless; there are plenty of good candidates out there (really!) that could help fix a Bears’ offense that has been undeniably bad through Matt Nagy’s tenure. In his two years as the head coach, the highest Nagy’s running or passing units have finished in terms of total yards is 11th (run game 2018). They finished 27th in rushing yards this year, and have yet to crack the top-20 in passing yards either season.

While the specific personnel choices can be debated, the Bears were always going to fire a healthy chunk of their offensive coaching staff after the nosedive that was their 2019 season. What the Bears were *never* going to do was fire 2018’s Coach, or Executive, Of the Year — a point made abundantly clear during Halas Hall’s end-of-season media availability. Someone had to be held accountable, though, and there probably wasn’t an easier target in the room than Mark Helfrich and Harry Hiestand, both of whom were reportedly the top minds behind a Bears’ running game which finished the year among the league’s worst.

Living under the bus is an occupational hazard for NFL coordinators, and far be it from the Bears to buck any league-wide status quo. In Nagy’s case, you can sort of understand why: Imagine being hired as the offensive genius who will finally bring one of the NFL’s self-proclaimed crown jewels back to relevance, only to have a lack of offensive ingenuity become a central pillar of concern for this Bears window. When it comes to offseason plans, Nagy’s not exactly playing his cards close to the chest, either — it doesn’t take the Boston Globe’s Spotlight team to figure out what all the connected candidates have in common.

But just looking at the names attached to the position says enough. Pat Shurmur has a .292 winning percentage as a head coach, and even as an OC his offenses have only ever finished a season in the top-10 of both passing and rushing yards twice — and that happened in back-to-back years (2013-2014). Mike Kafka’s only been coaching for three years and Pat Mahomes fell into his lap two months into his first NFL gig. Mornhinweg probably has the best resume of the bunch (sans Childress), but the optics of how presumptive MVP Lamar Jackson has played in his first season without Mornhinweg aren’t particularly flattering. Call it nitpicking if you want, but there’s a reason why the Bears seem more focused on getting one of Nagy’s guys vs. getting one of the market’s top candidates.

Teams were eventually going to stop bending over backwards to find a creative hire that looked like Sean McVay, so it shouldn’t be surprising that the Bears seem to be valuing experience over potential. Maybe there’s an NFL lifer out there that fixes the offense, and maybe it’s one of the aforementioned guys. But the Bears already have an offensive coordinator, and while he continues to operate as such, whoever replaces Helfrich should probably set up shop under the bus.

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