New Bears coach Thomas Brown preached accountability for a team that needed it — then he went a step further

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 pillar’s 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 Waldron’s firing.

But Brown said he wanted his team to embody three “abilities: coachability, accountability and dependability.

“That’s all of us, myself included,” he said Monday afternoon. “I’m not above coaching. I’m not above accountability. We get that done together.”

Then, he showed it.

Unprompted, before he opened the floor to questions, Brown brought up the team’s recent end-of-game losses. The Bears lost to the Washington Commanders on a poorly defended Hail Mary in late October. They’ve lost their past 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 didn’t stop the accountability there.

“I know there’s a lot of scrutiny, talk, dialogue about what’s 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 we’ll go through on a weekly basis to prepare ourselves for those opportunities. And on game day, we’ll execute.

“Don’t 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 DJ 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: There’s 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, it’s important for us to execute in those moments. But don’t 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. He could have leaned on his earlier line that “nobody cares about what happened before,” but a coach who preached “it’s not about the event — it’s about the response” instead responded both by declining to throw Eberflus under the bus and by acknowledging his own role.

“I won’t get into the weeds of what was communicated, not communicated, because that’s irrelevant, that’s 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.”