LAKE FOREST, Ill. – Matt Eberflus conducted his regular day-after-a-game press conference on Friday morning, roughly two hours before he was fired as Bears head coach.

The timing of it all seemed a little untoward and more than a tad disrespectful.

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The Bears took some flak for letting Eberflus go through the exercise in futility, allowing him to ignorantly state he was confident he’d remain head coach while general manager Ryan Poles, team president Kevin Warren and chairman George McCaskey were secretly deciding his fate.

The Bears chose not to move the timing of Eberflus’ press conference, which could’ve suggested something negative when decisions were outstanding. That was the logic behind letting Eberflus answer questions from the media.

“I think you know me, I think you know Ryan, I think you know George McCaskey and I think you know the McCaskey family, if one thing we stand for is family and integrity and doing it the right way,” Warren said in a Monday press conference. “In retrospect, could we have done it better? Absolutely, and I’ll be the first one to raise my hand, yes. But during his press conference and even a couple hours later, we had not reached a decision.”

Warren also said it was important for the Bears to tell him personally before word got out. ESPN’s Adam Schefter and other national insiders eventually broke the and then announced by the team.

It was clear following a disastrous ending to Thursday’s 23-20 loss to Detroit that Eberflus had lost the locker room, but the Bears didn’t want to make any decisions in the moment. That’s why the meeting was tabled to Friday, though the timing of it came in conflict with a press conference that was never moved and the Eberflus discussion was held in conflict with it.

“This was not a five-minute conversation,” Warren said. “When you’re talking about decisions that you’ve made about not only individual’s lives and careers, but we were very thoughtful. And the other thing that was really important is the fact that we not only played in Detroit. That’s Thanksgiving Day. And, I have just learned over my career that it’s important to try to at least get a good night sleep, which I don’t think any of us did Thursday night, but at least try to think clearer and be respectful to make better decisions. And I think once we had an opportunity to discuss this at length, we felt that Friday was the right time to do it.”

The Bears also informed Brown of his promotion to interim head coach on Friday. Brown got a chance to speak with Eberflus before the new man in charge left to spend time with his family over a weekend off.

The end of Eberflus’ tenure as head coach wasn’t sparkling, with major issues exposed during a prolonged and ongoing losing streak. The Lions loss was the breaking point, but there were major mistakes leading up to that. If the Bears acted sooner, maybe the season could’ve been saved.

“It’s hard to go back and figure out if everything would’ve been different, but I want to make sure that we see a process through and not make a split decision,” Poles said. “Just like we talked about from after Thursday, there’s times where you’ve got to reflect back, see what maybe some of the issues are, is there a system problem, and is it repetitive enough to make a move at that time.

“Working through each of those weeks, we saw a little spurt in the three-win streak that we had there, and then we started going down this recent path where things started getting a little bit more repetitive and that’s when eventually we got together and had that conversation.”

Poles identified a theme within Eberflus’ struggles as head coach that wasn’t remedied and continued to prevent the Bears from making expected progress in his third season, and that was a major factor in him getting let go.

“When you look at the end of the game situations, just some of the detailing to finish in those moments,” Poles said. “We all know a lot of these games come down to those critical spots that we weren’t able to get over the hump.”