When Matt Nagy was offensive coordinator for the Kansas City Chiefs back in 2017, he and his staff would convene to watch college film of Patrick Mahomes, then the quarterback at Texas Tech. They, along with head coach Andy Reid and the personnel department, liked what they saw, to the point of trading up from No. 27 to No. 10 to draft Mahomes. Nagy then worked with Mahomes for one season before heading to Chicago to coach the quarterback who’d gone off the board eight picks before.
So Nagy didn’t have Mahomes on Sunday night, didn’t have a lot of the weapons and options that his mentor on the other sideline did. Still, the Bears’ 26-3 sleepwalk marked the 11th time in the last 20 games in which the Nagy offense has failed to score even 17 points. Eight of those 11 have come this season. (By comparison, the Dowell Loggains offense had eight sub-17-point games in 2016, with Mike Glennon and a rookie Mitch Trubisky at quarterback.)
In the blowout loss to the Chiefs, the Bears’ offense bumbled through its ninth of 15 first quarters this season without a touchdown. Overall, the Bears’ 234 total yards marked the 10th time in 15 games that the Nagy offense has failed to reach 300.
Stay in the game with the latest updates on your beloved Chicago sports teams! Sign up here for our All Access Daily newsletter.
Not all of that can be laid on inept player performances, although there was no shortage of those in a game that dropped the Bears to 7-8 and underscored the widening gap between this team and the NFL’s best, which the Bears thought they could be entering this season.
Perhaps this all straightens out. Reid was 40 years old when he was first hired as a head coach. Nagy was 39, so Reid has a 20-year head start on Nagy and has managed over that time to make his version of the West Coast offense timeless, reaching postseasons coaching four different quarterbacks (Donovan McNabb, Michael Vick, Alex Smith, Mahomes).
Reid’s first team averaged 17 points per game with a rookie McNabb. Nagy’s team has regressed to 17 points per game with Trubisky in what was advertised as Nagy Offense 202.
At times it has seemed that Nagy brought chapters from the Reid playbook but not the adaptability that has been key to the mentor’s sustained success. Whether Nagy can develop that adaptability is perhaps the biggest cloud overhanging 2020 and beyond.
