Despite an endless amount of “tricks up his sleeve,” Chicago Bears head coach Matt Eberflus is on a seat so hot he'll need to be treated for third-degree burns at season's end. And when he seeks out medical treatment for those burns (hypothetical, of course), he'll need to do so without the medical insurance provided by an employer, because it's a virtual certainty that Eberflus will be unemployed at season's end, per Albert Breer of Sports Illustrated.

In his latest mailbag, Breer answered the question of a reader who asked what the chances were of Matt Eberflus being fired. Breer's response:

“I’d say the chances that Bears president Kevin Warren wants to remake the football operation, and maybe be more intimately involved in it after the season, are strong. So I think it’d probably take a late-season surge from the team to get Matt Eberflus a third season in Chicago.”

Could Jim Harbaugh be Chicago bound? 

From there, Breer addressed the rumors that Chicago and former Bears quarterback/current Michigan football coach/Ric Flair superfan Jim Harbaugh would have mutual interest in coming together ahead of the 2024 season:

“The Bears would be out of their minds not to at least explore Harbaugh, who’s built a distinctive style of team everywhere he’s been—his groups at Stanford looked like his groups at San Francisco and Michigan—and was wildly successful in his four years running the Niners.”

Now it would be really convenient for me to say, ‘Let's put aside the Michigan football scandal for a second,' because after all, I'm a Chicago Bears fan who desperately wants a competent coach leading my favorite team. And if Jim Harbaugh has proven anything over his twenty-plus year career as a football coach, it's that he's far more than just competent. He's led his teams to high level success at every stop of the way. Why couldn't he do the same thing in Chicago?

At this point, any story linking Harbaugh to the Bears is just speculation based on Harbaugh's four years as the Bears starting quarterback, and the Bears standing as one of the marquee franchises in the NFL, despite a nearly 40 year draught since their one and only Super Bowl victory… which just so happened to be the last time the Bears were coached by one of their former players. But the rumors are out there, and with every passing day, with every Bears loss on Matt Eberflus' watch and with every twist and turn in the Michigan saga, the smoke will eventually turn into a burning flame.