Saw this posted on the Trib site, and the Bears official site. On the surface, it isn't huge news, but it does raise some potentially interesting thoughts.
For one thing, Lovie Smith said just last week that he looked to keep his whole coaching staff intact. If someone was going to go, I expected it to be due to a firing (maybe Darryl Drake or Pep Hamilton) or a promotion (maybe Dave Toub, although I think both he and the NFL are a couple years off from a special teams coordinator making a legitimate run for a head coaching gig). Seeing Nickerson resign without anything else seemingly lined up is a bit curious.
More importantly, will this have any impact on the team, and if so, what will it be? I felt that Nickerson was probably the Bears' most irrelevant position coach in 2007. He inherited a starting line-up consisting of a future Hall-of-Fame MLB, a perennial Pro-Bowler WLB, and an intelligent SLB with no ego who's always in the right position, never takes plays off, and plays mistake free while doing all the dirty work that frees up the others to make the big plays. In short, Nickerson walked into a perfect situation for a LB coach. Did any of these guys improve noticably under his watch? No, but they were all veterans and known commodities, so I won't necessarily hold that against him. At best, he kept some veterans motivated & playing hard in a trying season. At worst, he was smart enough to stay out of their way and let them do their thing without interference.
Regardless of what Nickerson was or wasn't, his replacement will be an important hire for Lovie. Urlacher & Hillenmeyer can pretty much coach themselves at this point, but chances are Briggs is gone, which means our next LB coach's main task will be to help groom & mold Jamar Williams into a worthy replacement, and Michael Okwo into a back-up/potential future starter. The departure of Briggs, promotion of Williams from #4 Lb into starter, and promotion of Okwo from IR to the #4, will pose much bigger challenges to our next LB coach than anything faced by Hardy Nickerson, or for that mater anything faced by Bob Babich during his stint as our LB coach.
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1 comment:
Pat,
So Nickerson is gone. Strange that it isn't... for something.
I forgot about Okwo. But Williams is ready to go, and the word around the team is that he's smart. I'm not concerned about him. While losing a guy like Briggs will hurt, my impression of Williams' play is that he could start on a lot of NFL teams. I'm excited to see him get a shot.
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