After a pummeling at the hands of a well-rested, better coached, better schemed, more talented — just better in every sense — Tampa Bay Buccaneers squad on Sunday, the Chicago Bears possess the third lowest points scored per game average — just 14.4 per contest.

Matt Nagy’s Bears have eclipsed twenty points just three times this season, all in winning efforts. In the team’s four losses? Just 9.25 points per game. Twenty-four against the now 0-7 Detroit Lions in Week 4 is the highest point output for the Bears this season. The Bears mustered fourteen in losses to the Rams and Packers.

When the Bears win, even against the worst team in the NFL, it’s a scrappy dogfight until the final whistle. When the Bears lose, it’s a blowout from the first snap.

Replacing Matt Nagy with Offensive Coordinator Bill Lazor as play caller felt like a band-aid over a bullet wound, but at least the Bears were taking shots with their new first-round quarterback.

And with Nagy relegating himself to being a head coach for just the second time in his four year stay in Chicago, a small amount of hope crept into our minds that the Bears would become more disciplined and better overall with a singular voice and sideline presence.

Instead, Bilal Nichols punches Buccaneers’ Center Ryan Jensen resulting in the defensive end’s ejection already trailing 35-3 in the third quarter.

Nagy failed the offense, the pressure mounted and he fired himself from calling the plays. But now Nagy’s failing the entire team and those responsible for firing Nagy once and for all are silent.

Nobody’s seen George McCaskey or Ted Phillips to publicly face the music since they tried convincing the fan base that they had everything figured out except for the quarterback following last season’s playoff loss.

Hello, is anybody in there?

The fear, regardless of McCaskey’s emotional pleas following constant failures, becomes that the organization is comfortably numb to the outside angst. With seemingly little to no perception on how upset the fanbase truly is, McCaskey and Phillips’ absence from public view comes across as willful ignorance.

Nothing is different despite the radical changes to the status quo promised for three years. The organization finds itself stuck in a fifteen-year rut, but McCaskey and Phillips are both trying to steer without anybody trying to push.

And Matt Nagy’s favorite post-loss presser quip talks about identifying “the whys”, while Ryan Pace hides in a closet somewhere in Halas Hall to avoid the noise. The refusal to identify the issues at hand stems from the consequences of not allowing football minds to make football decisions from the very start.

Ted Phillips admitted his lack of football knowledge when he required the services of another former executive, Ernie Accorsi, to consult on the hiring of Ryan Pace in 2015. And George McCaskey just figured this was how things worked for a team president sixteen years into their reign.

Hey! Nagy! Leave the Bears alone!

But as the music grows louder and louder, it’s almost impossible to not view the immediate future of Bears football as impending doom for today’s regime. However, the refusal from management to act upon the failures of the staff, all in all, is just another brick in the wall. Nobody’s quite sure what the rest of the season entails or if changes are on the table following another potentially gruesome season. Nobody knows how low the standards for football reach into the depths of hell for Bears ownership.

Swimming in a fishbowl, year after year.

The phrase “at what point is enough enough” flew out the window after last season. Sunday’s performance in Tampa, COVID absences and all, serves as the cherry on top.

The time to act, to fire the incompetent, passed. The time to identify the whys following consecutive 8-8 seasons was upon the conclusion of consecutive 8-8 seasons, not three, six or seven weeks into the new year.

Cutting ties with Nagy only opens the door for Bill Lazor to act as interim, and while that’s certainly far from a fix to the team’s woes, Nagy’s presence only seems to serve as a detriment to the health of the team’s chemistry and quarterback’s development moving forward.

Recognizing one of the grandest mistakes in the recent history of the franchise, moving on from Nagy (and Pace, too) as soon as humanly possible is the first step in regaining any semblance of trust from a fan base that expects better because they deserve better.