People keep saying that there isn’t much Matt Eberflus can do for Justin Fields. He is a defensive coach. It has been that way for 30 years. The guy doesn’t know how to speak the quarterback language. Only an offensive coach can do that. While that might be technically true, this assumption that Eberflus is useless to his quarterback is not true. He has value, just in a different way. Something Fields has never experienced before.
Remember that his entire development was involved solely with offensive coaches up to this point. Matt Dickmann in high school and Ryan Day at Ohio State make up the list. Then he spent a year with Matt Nagy as a rookie. He’s never had somebody like Eberflus calling the shots before. The Bears head coach feels he has something unique to offer. He explained what that is to Adam Hoge of CHGO.
“That’s been great. Really just from the onset of meeting with Luke (Getsy) and the rest of the offensive staff and having individual conversations with the position coaches. Talking about either a run scheme or a pass concept. Really, imparting some, you know, other side perspective — defensive side perspective — in terms of technique, fundamentals and then what’s hard on that coverage. So I’ve done that a couple times. And I told them I have several ideas.”
Don’t underestimate how valuable such information can be.
Nobody understands what stresses defenses better than the guys who coach it. Matt Eberflus has done this for a long time. He has an almost encyclopedic knowledge of what offenses can do to make life hard for him. Imparting that wisdom to Fields will give the quarterback critical insights on how to attack from snap to snap based on alignments and coverages. Good results will follow once he learns to take that information and apply it to his play on the field.
Tom Brady benefitted from the same thing in New England. Bill Belichick was, and still is, one of the best defensive coaches in NFL history. Few are better at keeping quarterbacks off-balance with constant wrinkles in coverage and pressure. Once Brady started seeing the game from that perspective, defenses found it almost impossible to stop him. He always seemed one step ahead.
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Fields can be the same way. The physical side of his game isn’t the issue. It is absorbing and processing the necessary information at a high enough speed to consistently execute at a high level. That is where Eberflus wants to get him.
