Hub Arkush: Do Bears need a football czar to get general manager, head coach jobs right?

Following the Chicago Bears' epic collapse against the Detroit Lions Sunday, calls for the firings of Ted Phillips, Ryan Pace and/or Matt Nagy are nearing a crescendo.

Fueling all the noise is all kinds of wild reporting about whose likely to be out, who’s likely to be in, the current mood of team Chairman George McCaskey, etc.

Nagy said Monday he still believes he has the support of ownership.

Rather than sitting around and pretending to know what’s next for the Bears when in reality we’re all just guessing right now, let’s talk about what we believe could best serve the franchise going forward.

I can report as fact the McCaskey family absolutely wants to win not as badly as the most rabid of Bears fans, but even more so.

Strangely though none of the McCaskey children or grandchildren of NFL co-founder George Halas have ever immersed themselves deeply enough on the football side of the business to become experts in how to win consistently and contend for championships.

For that reason the arrow of responsibility often points to Phillips, the team’s president and CEO over the past 21 seasons, but in fact he is an accountant by trade who has also never devoted his full attention to coaching, playing or evaluating talent.

As a result whenever the Bears have felt the need to make coaching and/or front office changes they’ve been forced to turn to executive search firms or NFL consultants for guidance, but these folks work for a flat fee and have no skin in the game once the hires are made – win, lose or draw.

These realities have led many to speculate that what McCaskey needs to do if he is serious about finally getting this right is kick Phillips out or sideways and hire a true football czar of sorts to evaluate coaches, scouts and personnel experts, one of whom might make a good general manager.

A good idea?

The standard of excellence in the NFL over the past decade or so has been the New England Patriots, Pittsburgh Steelers, Baltimore Ravens, Kansas City Chiefs, Green Bay Packers, New Orleans Saints and Seattle Seahawks.

Remarkably strong head coach and general manager tandems, hired by and reporting directly to ownership, run six of those seven clubs.

Only the Packers with President and CEO Mark Murphy, a former NFL player himself have the kind of football wizard some Bears watchers are calling for and that is because as a publicly held company there is no one owner for him to report to.

Bill Belichick, Andy Reid, Sean Payton and Pete Carroll are the most important football voices with their clubs, while general managers Kevin Colbert in Pittsburgh, Chris Ballard in Indianapolis and Eric DeCosta (who just recently replaced Ozzie Newsome) in Baltimore are the strongest voices with their franchises.

None of these clubs have a Mark Murphy, Theo Epstein or Bill Polian type charged with hiring coaches and general managers.

Should McCaskey now feel the need to make dramatic changes again there really is no magic formula to help him get it right.

The idea of hiring an executive vice president of football operations and charging that person with finding a general manager or director of player personnel and head coach still requires McCaskey identifying the right top football guy and would be contrary to the way the league’s most successful teams are currently run.

At the end of the day, McCaskey and not some unknown football savant is the ultimate answer to whether or not the Bears can get this right, and there’s really no other way to spin it.

Talking with executives around the NFL I’ve prepared a list of the top candidates in the game right now to fill either a general manager’s or vice president’s of football operations role should Phillips and/or Pace leave that we will offer in this space this week.

But remember, the name at the top of that list six years ago was Ryan Pace.