ESPN: Bears Player Says Locker Room a 'S--t Show' After Eberflus Spoke for 'Seconds'

Former Chicago Bears head coach Matt Eberflus spoke in the locker room for just "seconds" before he was cut off by players after Thanksgiving Day's loss to the Detroit Lions, according to ESPN's Courtney Cronin.

The result of Eberflus' attempted speech was described by one Bears player as a "s--t show," per Cronin.

She went on to describe the scene:

"As players filed into the locker room after the loss, Eberflus began delivering a message that fell on deaf ears. The tone, according to one player, spoke to how players battled and came up short. As Eberflus spoke, an exasperated Jaylon Johnson interrupted his head coach and began shouting obscenities out of frustration from the same results playing out over and over.

"Eberflus cut his message short and walked out of the room."

The following day, the then-Chicago coach told reporters in a morning Zoom call he was "confident" he would be leading the Bears in Week 14 against the San Francisco 49ers. The team announced his dismissal hours later.

Johnson addressed the exchange in a Monday appearance on the Spiegel & Holmes Show by 670 The Score.

"Guys get fired all the time – players, coach, GM, it happens. I don't necessarily feel like I was just some major part that played a role in getting (Eberflus) fired. That's not on me," he said on Tuesday (h/t Audacy.) "But at the end of the day, there was frustration, there were words from myself that I expressed just from my frustration of losing.

"Part of what I said after the game is I've been losing for five years. So, I mean, I feel like a high-level player like myself, after a certain point, losing games how we've been losing games, someone has to express something."

Johnson's frustration followed a clock-management mistake on the final drive of the loss to the Lions.

With just more than 30 seconds remaining, rookie quarterback Caleb Williams was sacked at Detroit's 41-yard line.

Instead of calling his team's final timeout, Eberflus waited in the hopes Chicago could gain a few more yards into field-goal territory. But the Bears couldn't set up for the next snap in time, and the game ended on an incompletion.

The loss marked Chicago's sixth straight and the continuation of Eberflus' struggles to close out games with narrow margins of victory.

Eberflus completed his Bears career with a 5-17 record in one-score games, per Larry Lage of the Associated Press. Among 221 NFL coaches with at least 20 such games on their record, his 22.7 win percentage ranked last.

Thomas Brown, who took over as interim head coach following Eberflus' firing, will hope for better results both on the field and in the locker room as he prepares for his first game at the helm in San Francisco this Sunday.