Chicago Bears head coach Matt Eberflus and Los Angeles Chargers head coach Jim Harbaugh are the current favorites to win the NFL Coach of the Year ahead of the 2024 season. This is according to DraftKings Sportsbook.
Both Eberflus and Harbaugh inherited struggling teams. Eberflus is entering his third season as head coach of the Chicago Bears after being named the 17th head coach in franchise history in January 2022.
The Chicago Bears couldn’t crack the postseason code in 2023 and finished with a 7-10 record.
The 2024 NFL Draft gave the Bears a chance to revamp the position they’ve struggled most to fill: quarterback.
The last two Bears quarterbacks, Mitchell Trubisky and Justin Fields, failed to live up to expectations. The franchise banked their season on No.1 overall pick Williams to elevate the offense in 2024.
Now with rookie quarterback Caleb Williams leading the offense, Chicago is slated to be a playoff contender this season.
Bears general manager Ryan Poles knows the former Trojan is a playmaker, but he wants the rookie to rely on his teammates to help make big plays happen.
“I want him to lean on the talent around him and then when the time is right—and that’s an instinctual thing and I think that plays right into him—that’s when you do the special,” Poles said via the team’s transcript. “And balancing that. Sometimes it’s going to get out of whack one way or the other, but always come back to that. It’s kind of like that neutral place where he’s at his best, and I think he has that just from studying him and watching years of tape on him.
“He has that ability, and so I think that’s kind of the big thing. Lean on the guys around him, be instinctual, let those wild plays happen at the right time. We saw it in the preseason a little bit. That’s going to be important.”
Harbaugh enters his first year as the Chargers head coach. The Bolts were ranked the league’s worst run-blocking offensive line in 2023, but Harbaugh has a reputation for transforming struggling programs.
He already changed the perception of the Chargers organization upon his arrival in Los Angeles.
The Chargers hiring Harbaugh sparked a ton of buzz throughout the football world.
“You don’t build a resume like Jim’s by accident, and you don’t do it by yourself,” president of football operations John Spanos said in January. “You need a team. And nobody has built a team more successfully, and repeatedly, in recent history than Jim Harbaugh. His former players swear by him, and his opponents swear at him. Jim is one of one, and we couldn’t be more excited to have him back in the Chargers organization as our head coach.”
The hype surrounding both the Bears and Chargers will be put to the test in just a few days as Week 1 of the NFL regular season kicks off.
The Bears take on the Tennesee Titans on Sept. 8, while the Chargers face division rivals, the Las Vegas Raiders, later that afternoon.
The Chargers earned a historically bad 63-21 loss to the Raiders at the end of the 2023 season, which means that tension will be high as Los Angeles hopes to earn a redemption win.
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