Shane Waldron is out, Thomas Brown is in
The Chicago Bears will have a new offensive coordinator at the helm for their Week 11 matchup with the Packers.
According to NFL Network’s Tom Pelissero, the Bears have fired offensive coordinator Shane Waldron and will turn to pass game coordinator Thomas Brown to run the show on that side of the ball.
Waldron was only nine games into his tenure as the Bears’ offensive coordinator, but Chicago has dropped three straight and has been floundering on offense. Since their bye in Week 7, the Bears have scored just 15, nine, and three points over their last three games. And despite a major offseason influx of talent, the Bears have been relatively punchless on offense overall this season, ranking 24th in scoring, 30th in yards, and near the bottom of the league in just about any other stat you can find.
Waldron may have been hamstrung by the Bears’ offensive line, which has allowed rookie quarterback Caleb Williams to be sacked 38 times in their first nine games, the worst total in the league. But the Bears — and more specifically head coach Matt Eberflus — are in dire straits, and were virtually obligated to make a change.
Brown, like Waldron, is in his first year with the Bears after spending last season with the Carolina Panthers. Prior to the Panthers, Brown spent the 2020-22 seasons with the Los Angeles Rams, winning the Super Bowl in 2021.
The Panthers, obviously, were no offensive juggernaut under Brown, but there’s one funny footnote to his time in Carolina. The Panthers scored 30 or more points in exactly one game last year: their Week 16 loss to the Green Bay Packers.
Joe Barry is no longer running the Packers’ defense, but maybe there’s reason for caution here. The Bears can’t fix everything that ails their offense in a week, but Brown takes over now as a relative unknown. There’s not much of a book on him, and if the Bears get any kind of a dead cat bounce in the wake of Waldron’s departure, maybe their offense looks a little friskier against the Packers than it has in recent weeks.
There’s also the fact that the Packers under Matt LaFleur have historically struggled after their bye week. They’ve lost three of their five post-bye games in the LaFleur era. If the Bears are any more lively on offense with Brown calling the shots, the Packers will have to be that much more vigilant against coming out flat after their bye.