On the heels of the Chicago Bears’ biggest loss since 2014, the team’s COVID-19 outbreak has sidelined coach Matt Nagy.
Nagy announced Monday morning he tested positive for the virus after returning home from Tampa, where the Bears were shellacked 38-3 on Sunday at Raymond James Stadium by the defending Super Bowl champion Bucs.
Special teams coordinator Chris Tabor will run all team meetings as he did briefly in the spring and as the Bears had planned in the event anything happened to Nagy. That leaves offensive coordinator Bill Lazor and defensive coordinator Sean Desai to continue in their roles uninterrupted.
Four players are currently on the reserve/COVID-19 list: outside linebacker Robert Quinn, tight end Jimmy Graham, inside linebacker Caleb Johnson and offensive tackle Elijah Wilkinson. Running back Damien Williams and wide receivers coach Mike Furrey returned last week after being sidelined, meaning the Bears have had five players and two coaches dealing with COVID-19 in the last two weeks.
“It’s a reminder to all of us to be extremely cautious to understand where we’re at,” said Nagy, who indicated he feels pretty good. “We’ve seen it with other teams in the league and society in general. We’re going to have a good plan put in place.”
As a fully vaccinated individual, Nagy will be cleared to return to football activities when he has returned two negative tests 24 hours apart. How long that will take is unknown as the 3-4 Bears turn their focus to Sunday’s game against the San Francisco 49ers at Soldier Field. At this point, the Bears don’t have any other positive tests to report, but the four players on the list popped up between last Wednesday and Sunday morning.
Other NFL head coaches have been sidelined by COVID-19. Arizona Cardinals coach Kliff Kingsbury missed a game earlier this season, Tennessee Titans coach Mike Vrabel was sidelined in late August and Cleveland Browns coach Kevin Stefanski tested positive in January and missed the franchise’s first playoff game since 2002.
Nagy’s absence is a blow for the Bears as they search for answers to breathe some life into one of the league’s worst offenses — one that’s challenging the Terry Shea-coordinated 2004 offense in terms of ineptitude. The Bears rank 30th in scoring and 32nd in total yards, yards per play, passing yards, passing yards per play and third-down conversions.
The Bears opened as a four-point underdog at home against the 49ers, who enter the game on a four-game losing streak.
Nagy indicated after the Week 7 game that the Bears are as close as they’ve been at any point after developments in the last 24 to 48 hours. After revealing his positive COVID-19 test Monday, he expanded a little bit, saying that was the feeling he came away with after a team meeting at the hotel Saturday night.
“Big picture, I think sometimes as a coach you’ve got to have a feel and pulse as to where your guys are at,” he said. “Every now and then you’ve got to pull together and have a good talk with the guys where it’s open and it’s everybody. I just thought it was a good opportunity right there to speak from the heart a little bit from where I’m at as the head coach and where we’re at as a team. You can’t have those every week, but sometimes you’ve got to have some that are real conversations and mean a lot. That’s what we did.
“The question was something about ‘Are you concerned after this type of loss of losing your locker room, losing your team?’ That’s why I responded the way I did. I’m not because I know the feedback I got after that talk. To have that feedback from your players feels good.”
That sounds a lot like what Nagy said happened after the brutal loss in Cleveland in Week 3 when the offense gained only 47 yards on 42 plays in a 26-6 defeat. Nagy is right, those soul-searching chats can’t become a regular event. As the Bears try to get healthy, the only way at this point for them to prove that culture and a committed team effort are in place is to go out and perform better. Everything else is chatter.
“It comes down to us doing it,” Nagy said. “We have to do it and we have to perform and put the points on the board so we can win games. That’s our No. 1 focus right now is being able to understand, OK, we talk about an identity and trying to do certain things and run certain plays. We need to score a lot more points, and however we do that, whatever it is, we have to score more points so we can win. If we all have that same mindset to fixing it, we all have to do it.”
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