I am a Bears fan.

Like all other Bears fans, I have been somewhere between “very disappointed” and “angy” in the results of the first season of the “Caleb Williams Era.”

A 4-2 start was followed by the seven-game losing streak the Bears are mired in right now, and within it the firing of offensive coordinator Shane Waldron one week and then Head Coach Matt Eberflus the following week.

Any Bears fan who is paying any attention at all knows that those changes were necessary and long overdue.

Eberflus came to Chicago from Indy, where he was in charge of the defense for the Colts. The defense of the Bears benefitted greatly from his knowledge.

But Waldron was a relative unknown from Seattle, had never called plays before, and was a strange choice to join the Bears to help run the Bears offense — no matter who the quarterback was.

Waldron clearly didn’t know the basics of what his job required. Even I know that you script out the first so many plays of a game based on the overall game plan developed during the week.

Waldron didn’t do that until the players went to Eberflus to have a meeting to voice their concerns.

Eberflus couldn’t figure out the finer points of when to take times outs at the end of the half and at the end of games.

That would be like someone getting a marketing job at one of the orthopedic companies, and on the first day asking someone to help them write the first sentence of a press release.

So after letting both the head coach and the play caller go, a guy who was not someone on anyone’s radar as being highly influential on the Bears of 2024 went from being an offensive coach to the offensive coordinator one week to being the head coach of the whole team the next.

We heard the players sing the praises of Thomas Brown. We heard them say how strong his leadership style was. They talked all week about how different the atmosphere in the locker room was.

And then they had to actually play a game.

They had rid themselves of those they had screamed from the highest mountaintop to be the obstacles to their success and the thorns in their sides and now, with those impediments removed, they were free and clear to move forward.

What happened was they looked like garbage, smelled like garbage and played like garbage in a 38-13 loss at San Francisco.

I cannot imagine a more uninspired group of human beings in all my life.
They let San Francisco march up and down the field on them for an entire half undaunted, and their offense…well, their offense was so bad that me getting up from my chair to go to lay on the couch at halftime meant I had moved farther than the Bears had in the first 30 minutes of football.

It was pitiful.

It was disgusting.

It was shameful.

Why so?

But it was the players who were responsible for it.

They are the ones who went to management to complain about their coaches. They were the ones who confronted the coaches to their faces in a very public power struggle—and they won.

They got exactly what they wanted and then went on the field to show us how much they really didn’t know any more than the coaches did.

Their reward for their actions was supposed to be freedom, but what it turned out to be was a mutiny. They had taken over the ship, and in their celebration they ran it straight into the rocks and sunk it.

Where is the leadership?

Where is the accountability?

Are we to heap this all on Brown, the interim coach? Remember, a month ago he was a position coach and no one outside of the organization knew his name.

Nope. This is completely on the players. They took this upon themselves to clank their drink cups on their prison bars and now they have to live with the consequences.

Their remaining schedule is hard and the teams in their path are good and hungry for playoff spots. They will all have something to play for, but not the Bears.

No, the Bears are facing another top-10 draft pick and another off-season of wondering if they are anywhere closer than where they were two years ago to having a winner along the lake shore … or in Arlington … or wherever they are going to play.

The lesson to learn here is this: Keep your mouth shut, keep your head down, and just do your job.

The post Be careful of what you demand appeared first on News Now Warsaw.

AKRON — A familiar face will return to Tippecanoe Valley in the fall.

Not as a player, not as an assistant or even referee, but this time as a head coach,

On Tuesday morning Tippecanoe Valley School Board confirmed Rebekah Parker as their new girls basketball coach effective immediately.

Parker was instrumental as a player at TVHS, as well as assistant coach before stepping away from coaching to spend time with her family but feels the time is right to return home.

“This has always been an end goal for me, when the job became available I didn’t have to think twice about it,” Parker said after Tuesday's announcement while speaking in the same gym where she scored 1,418 career points as a player.

A native of Silver Lake, Parker had a storied hall of fame career for the Vikings. As a player, she lead the Vikings to a 73-21 record, and helped secure the first three sectional championships in program history under head coach Gary Teel.

Capping off her senior season in 2004 with an Indiana All-Star nod. Parker hopes to bring a lot of the same style from her playing days under coach Teel.

She recalled a time when she went to watch coach Teel, who was then coaching at Argos, run the same system, same plays, all the way to a state finals run. Those same things that were successful but did not end with the same results in her time at Valley.

“What I took from that was it’s not what you do, it's the effort you put into and the buy-in that it takes and that’s what I hope to instill in our players,” she said.

After her prep career Parker played collegiately at Evansville, where she started all 120 games in 4 seasons, and All-Missouri Valley Conference honors three times. After Evansville, she played professionally in Finland and Germany.

As for the vision of what a program under a TVHS athletic Hall of famer might look like, Parker relayed the same things that made her the player she was and coach has become.

“The first thing that always comes to mind is hard work, and I know that kind of cliche and everyone wants to say that but for me as an individual that’s the only thing I know, and I think that is going to show through them on the court,” she said.

Parker takes over a team who graduated five seniors and finished with a 19-4 record before falling in the sectional championship to Bremen.

The post Parker returns as Viking’s girls basketball coach appeared first on News Now Warsaw.