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Kalyn Kahler, ESPN
LAKE FOREST, Ill. — Matt Eberflus panicked. He looked down at the barber’s cape and saw several inches of his wet hair clinging to the navy fabric.
“Funk, that seems like a lot off.”
“Don’t worry about it,” said his barber, Lawrence Funk. “Let me do it.”
Eberflus laughed and surrendered. He had a new lease on his coaching life, so he might as well try out a new look.
He’d walked into the barber shop at Halas Hall that Tuesday in February armed with a few reference photos. He’d worn a traditional gentleman’s cut for years but his wife, Kelly, really wanted him to go shorter. He kept his hair long with a short sideburn and slicked it back with a shiny gel every day, and he kept a clean shave. He always hated when the longer hair above his ear wouldn’t cooperate and his daughters would laugh at him when it looked like he had wings flapping out of the back of his headset when the cameras caught him on the sideline.
Eberflus hadn’t had a news conference in a month, so there had been no reason to shave. And when Funk saw the silver stubble combined with Kelly’s ideas for a shorter cut, he saw a brand new Bear.
Funk convinced Eberflus to keep the beard, lined it up and blended it into the now short sides of his hair. Two days later, Eberflus took to the lectern to introduce his two new coordinators for the 2024 season, but the fans commenting on the livestream had more to say about his new look than the new hires. Just a month earlier, this same comment section had been calling for his head.
Matt Eberflus got a beard now?!?! It’s official. We’re winning the division
Flus looks mad ready for a Super Bowl
EBEARDFLUS IS UNDEFEATED
Funk was at his salon downtown while Eberflus met the media in Lake Forest. His phone rang, and it was former Bears guard Kyle Long, who wasted no time.
“Did you cut Flus’ hair?”
“Yeah, on Tuesday.”
“I knew it bro,” Long said. “That’s a gorgeous man.”
The response was so overwhelmingly positive that the coach even bought himself the Dyson hairdryer, a luxury styling tool that retails for around $429. Funk explained to him he wouldn’t be able to get the volume he wanted if he didn’t blow dry it first. Then he experimented with fashion and wore white jeans and a navy collared sweater to the NFL owners meeting.
“When you look nicer and you dress nicer, people respect you more,” Funk says. “Flus had the longer pushback hair that was kind of dangling when the wind’s blowing and he looked stressed out. You go from that and get a shorter haircut, grow a beard. He’s got some sun. He looks like a new person.”
Flus’ glow-up became the talk of the town. “The first thing I said [on the air] was, I know this is weird. He looks smarter!” says 670 The Score radio host Dan Bernstein.
And smarter was a big win for Eberflus, who had hemmed and hawed his way through many of his media appearances. A haircut and beard alone can’t change a team’s trajectory, but in the Super Bowl wasteland that is Chicagoland, a beard that has yet to win a game is already the stuff of legend.
Marquette basketball brings everyone together #MUBB | #WeAreMarquette pic.twitter.com/o34Q3zR4tZ
— Marquette Basketball (@MarquetteMBB) March 7, 2024
Late last season, Eberflus was firmly on the hot seat as the team went 7-10 and locked in the No. 1 overall pick from the Panthers, their best chance to draft their long-awaited franchise quarterback. Was the defensive coach with a 10-24 record really the best person to develop a rookie quarterback?
“Now look at where we’re at,” Funk says. “A full conversation about how much better he looks.”
Chicago is the new center of the NFL universe. Training camp tickets sold out for the first time, just two minutes after they became available. The team president is gunning for a new stadium to match his lofty vision for the charter club that has been stuck in the past, rookie quarterback Caleb Williams has vowed to end the decades-long championship drought, “Hard Knocks” cameras are rolling, and Eberflus finally projects the part.
NFL PRO SCOUTS spend their days monitoring movement around the league. They curate lists of free agents, track injury status and position depth on all 32 rosters, and collect details on opponent schemes by watching every news conference for every head coach and coordinator. But late last season, while grinding mind-numbing news conference tape, one pro scouting director for an AFC team tracked a very different kind of change. Chicago’s head coach actually looked comfortable?
“He was always very uptight and nervous when he had to talk,” the scouting director said. “And now he is more chill and relaxed and he’s not fumbling over his words or contradicting himself.”
The scouting director noticed the improvement in Eberflus sometime around Week 15, when the team collapsed late to the Cleveland Browns, a loss that dropped them to 5-9. He watched Eberflus explain the loss with more clarity. “I figured he really must have worked on this and found someone who could guide him,” the scouting director said.
Eberflus told the Chicago Sun-Times in June he didn’t get consultation or training on public speaking. But one source with direct knowledge of Eberflus’ media preparation told ESPN that Eberflus did overhaul his media prep, and that the coach went outside the organization during the season to enlist extra help after a viral news conference mishap in Week 9 where he struggled to answer simple questions about injured quarterback Justin Fields‘ game status. Fields was listed as doubtful, not out, the day before the game, even though Eberflus began the presser by saying Fields would not be playing. He stumbled through answers ranging from no, he’s not medically cleared but he’s close, to he might warm up, to “the chances are doubtful, 51% that he’s in or out and we’ll see where it is.”
Reporters were frustrated. Fans were confused.
“The Chicago market is just like New York,” said the AFC pro scouting director. “You can’t say, I’m not talking about that, because you’re going to get crushed. He was trying to massage it, but at the same time, you need to be savvy enough to beat around the bush and give them something without giving them anything.”
Eberflus’ agent, Trace Armstrong, declined to comment on whether Eberflus had received extra help. “Many coaches are driven, competitive people, and the really good ones continue to adapt, evolve and improve,” Armstrong said.
That bumbling presser on Fields’ status was the last of a run of uncomfortable moments for Eberflus, who earlier last season was so caught off guard by questions about an inactive Chase Claypool that a public relations staffer had to alert reporters that he misspoke about the receiver 30 minutes after the postgame news conference ended. And before that, he had to answer for the mysterious and sensationalized absence of defensive coordinator Alan Williams during Week 2, when it would have been more appropriate for the team president or owner to take questions first.
“Especially with the more controversial things, it doesn’t reflect only on Eberflus,” said Bernstein, the radio host. “Bears fans found it indicative of an organizational issue. If the coach is this confused, what does that say about how they’re doing business?”
Bears team president Kevin Warren spent his first year on the job taking notes on what the organization was missing. In March, he remodeled the front office to meet his standards.
“I’m respectfully greedy for this organization,” Warren told ESPN. “I want every single department in this organization to be viewed as the best in the industry.”
He fired the VP of public relations who had been responsible for preparing Eberflus for his daily news conferences, and gave those duties to director of football communications Aaron Clark. Warren shifted the SVP who oversaw football communications to a new role overseeing public and governmental affairs and hired Ted Crews away from the Chiefs for a newly created senior executive role overseeing corporate and football communications.
Crews was involved in the Netflix “Quarterback” series that featured Patrick Mahomes, and Warren said having Crews in the building is one reason he felt comfortable opening the doors to “Hard Knocks,” an opportunity that Warren sees as a way to “message” to the fan base as they “evolve as an organization, especially into the 21st century.”
Each NFL club is primarily responsible for setting up the coach for media success, but not all clubs prioritize public relations equally. For some organizations, the idea of consistency in messaging is more of a marketing concept that doesn’t extend to the coaches and players who give information to the media on a regular basis.
Last season, Fields created a weeklong news cycle when he told reporters at a news conference that he felt “robotic and not playing like himself” in the Bears’ offense, and Claypool became a headline when he answered “no” when asked if he felt the coaching staff was putting him in the best situation to succeed. Those players either didn’t know the team’s messaging or chose to ignore it.
Many players have their own publicists and marketing agents. Teams will often bring in outside experts to do media training workshops with all the players and coaches, but it’s less common for a head coach to look outside for hired help.
“There are a lot of guys that are really good football coaches that don’t understand the big picture. Calling the best plays on O or D, well, no, that’s not it. They have to be able to sell tickets, sell fans, and a lot of that is through the media.”
A former NFL head coach
One former repeat NFL coach said most coaches he knows don’t bother because they quickly learn winning is the only useful media strategy. (The coach requested anonymity because he didn’t win in his last stop).
“Bill Belichick — I wouldn’t say would be looked at as glam with the media, but what did he do? He won,” the former coach said. “Less is more. It is competitive, so you don’t want to be giving too much information. You don’t want to relax too much because you get diarrhea of the mouth and you say something that you regret. You have to be on guard.”
Eberflus told the Sun-Times that he’d been too guarded. Too nervous to say something he shouldn’t say. People around him say he’s not a naturally evasive person, which made it even more difficult to walk the fine line of withholding information and still feeling good about himself when talking about difficult situations.
But he knew he was in trouble because the team was losing and needed to seek any edge he could to keep his job. On the field, he changed the way he called his defense, general manager Ryan Poles traded for game-changing pass rusher Montez Sweat and the unit transformed into one of the NFL’s best. And off the field, he worked to avoid further media pitfalls. When asked how he got more comfortable speaking to the media, Eberflus, ever the football coach, credited getting in more reps, “just the time on task.”
Eberflus hasn’t given out any more specifics on his process, and the Bears’ public relations staff declined to make him available for an interview with ESPN on the matter. The industry of sports public relations fixers is mysterious and even a little bit underground. One expert in the field (who doesn’t work with Eberflus) doesn’t even have a website, and declined to speak on the record because their contracts with clients include a privacy requirement.
EBERFLUS IS 54 years old with 33 years of coaching experience. His first NFL job was on Eric Mangini’s Browns staff, where the ethos of Mangini’s mentor Bill Belichick ruled: Protect every piece of information.
When Eberflus became a defensive coordinator in Indianapolis in 2018, he spoke to reporters weekly. Colts reporters remember him as a nice guy, but one who didn’t give them anything to work with.
“There are a lot of guys that are really good football coaches that don’t understand the big picture,” a former head coach said. “Calling the best plays on O or D, well, no, that’s not it. They have to be able to sell tickets, sell fans, and a lot of that is through the media.”
That’s how Eberflus was raised in football. So however he did it, and whoever helped him, he has fought those Belichickian instincts.
Just how much has Eberflus improved? From a D grade to a B+, said message and media strategist Brett O’Donnell, who has worked with multiple political candidates over the past 20 years, including former President George W. Bush. O’Donnell reviewed Eberflus’ before and after news conferences to evaluate his performance.
“Consistency is a huge factor in communication,” O’Donnell said. “So if you start with one answer, you have to stick with that answer, and when you change your answer, that invites more questions.”
“It’s very clear that when he approached these situations [before], he didn’t think through, first, what the tough questions were, and second, how he was going to handle those questions.”
Bears long snapper Patrick Scales, the team’s longest tenured player, said Eberflus “does seem a little more polished” when he speaks in front of the team.
“There’s what he’s doing, and there’s also why he’s doing it,” Bernstein said. “This has nothing to do with how good a coach he is, or whether he’s going to keep his job, but the idea that a middle-aged assistant coach, NFL football guy, lifer, for him to care enough to do this is really cool.”
“Most people in his position, it wouldn’t matter, you’re the coach of the Bears. You can do what you want.”
Head coaches talk to the media more than any other team employee. Former Ravens public relations czar Kevin Byrne said that he counted one year, and coach John Harbaugh spoke to the media 119 times. “At the time we were leaving John out on the plank all the time,” Byrne said. “No one else was speaking.”
Byrne always reminded Harbaugh that his audience wasn’t the reporter asking the question. It was the team owner, and his players and coaches. They are listening to the coach’s message, and if they aren’t listening directly, someone close to them is.
The NFL is set up for every team to go 8-9 or 9-8, so, “if you’re 7-10, and you’re talking about this thing positively, you could probably win an extra year talking about the gains and focusing on the positives,” said Juan Lozano, coaching agent for Red Envelope Sports.
Chicago’s previous regime, with Ryan Pace and Matt Nagy, made the playoffs in two out of four years, in a division that still had Aaron Rodgers. But they failed to select the right quarterback and lost control of that narrative. The Bears looked like a team in chaos.
“You need a strong voice that knows what he’s doing in a press conference,” Lozano said. “How you talk about this can’t be this wishy-washy B.S.”
When Mangini was hired as the coach of the New York Jets in 2006, he’d held only one news conference in his coaching career. That experience didn’t prepare him for the New York media market, where his Belichickian style didn’t translate and although he took the Jets to the playoffs his first season, he quickly fell out of favor.
He said it didn’t take him long to hire a consultant to watch all his news conferences because he wanted the opinion of someone who wasn’t biased, who could evaluate him from a global view instead of a Jets perspective. Mangini spoke to his consultant about twice a week, but the work wasn’t enough to save his job after his third season, when the QB-starved franchise failed to meet high expectations after Brett Favre got hurt.
“It wasn’t for lack of effort,” Mangini said. “It just didn’t always quite hit.”
“Once you get labeled something, it’s pretty hard to dig out of that label. So if you get labeled as being difficult to work in the media, even if you change, even if you open up, that’s the stigma.”
EBERFLUS AND GENERAL manager Poles held a joint news conference on training camp report day. This January, Poles said it was his decision to retain Eberflus, with input from Warren and Bears owner George McCaskey. During their two seasons as coach and general manager in Chicago, Poles has been the recipient of most of the positive coverage. He has done the visible heavy lifting in assembling a roster that might be the best situation a No. 1 overall rookie quarterback has ever landed in, while Eberflus has had to answer for most of the team’s challenges.
If the Bears don’t win, many will consider it Eberflus’ fault. If they do win, Williams figures to get much of the credit. So far, it can feel like Eberflus is just there. A sidekick to Williams and Poles.
But not last Friday. Twice during the news conference, reporters directed questions to Poles that Eberflus felt he was better suited to answer. And this time he didn’t hesitate.
“I’ll take that one,” he said.
ESPN reporter Courtney Cronin contributed to this story.