Marc Trestman and GM Phil Emery fired by Chicago Bears after 5-11 season

Chicago's Marc Trestman experiment is over after just two seasons.

Plucked from the Canadian Football League and hailed as an offensive genius who would finally lift the mercurial Jay Cutler to elite quarterback status, Trestman was fired by the Chicago Bears on Monday after posting a 5-11 record in 2014 and an overall mark of 13-19 the past two seasons.

Trestman isn't the only one leaving Halas Hall looking fo a new job. The Bears also said goodbye to general manager Phil Emery after just three seasons. It was Emery who conducted an exhaustive search for his first head coach and ended up choosing Trestman over Bruce Arians, the presumptive NFL coach of the year with the Arizona Cardinals this season. Emery is also paying the price for signing quarterback Jay Cutler to an expensive extension last offseason.

How disastrous was Trestman and Emery’s tenure in the Windy City? Well, consider this: Trestman was let go after just 32 games, the second-shortest stay in team history to Paddy Driscoll’s 24 games in 1956-57. Dave Wannstedt and Dick Jauron, in comparison, were kept around for 96 and 80 games despite similar winning percentages.

"I want to thank Virginia, George and the McCaskey family, Phil Emery and Ted Phillips for giving me the opportunity to be the head coach of the Chicago Bears," Trestman said in a statement. "I also want to thank all the coaches and players who gave us everything we asked over the past two years. I have tremendous respect for this organization. Chicago is a special city with great fans. I appreciate the warm support my family and I received."

The McCaskey family admitting a mistake and quickly moving on seems like a progressive move for the usually conservative franchise. But it should be noted that Emery’s hiring of Trestman was viewed by some as a progressive and “thinking outside the box” move.

Armed with black-rimmed glasses, a law degree and vocabulary stocked with ten-dollar words, Trestman didn’t look like your typical football coach.

His resume was different, too with offensive coordinator or assistant coaching stops with nine different NFL teams before finally getting a head coaching opportunity north of the border with the Montreal Alouettes. He won back-to-back Grey Cups with the Alouettes in 2009 and 2010.

Trestman returned to the NFL (and the United States) on Jan. 16, 2013, just two days before his 57th birthday, when he was named the 14th head coach in the long history of the Chicago Bears.

Fans in Chicago initially didn’t know what to make of the soft-spoken coach who couldn’t have been more different from the exalted Mike Ditka had he tried. Trestman touted building relationships with “valued people” instead of tearing players down. He was an offensive mastermind in a city where Dick Butkus still looms large. He favored an analytical approach to the game instead of a loud one based on emotion.

The 2013 Bears got off to a 3-0 start but that proved to be the extent of Trestman’s honeymoon in Chicago. Despite building a top-five offense while journeyman Josh McCown subbed in for an injured Jay Cutler, Trestman’s team featured a dregs-of-the-league defense and backfiring decisions like opting to have Robbie Gould kick a potential 47-yard game-winning field goal on second-and-7 against the Minnesota Vikings instead of opting to get the ball closer. (Gould would miss the attempt and Chicago later lost the game.) The Bears went 8-8 in 2013, missing out on the playoffs after losing to the Green Bay Packers at Soldier Field in Week 17.

The 2014 season brought higher expectations with the return of a healthy Cutler, receivers Brandon Marshall and Alshon Jeffery, and a defense that was retooled through free agency. A Week 1 loss at home to the Buffalo Bills quickly dashed those dreams and led to a nightmare season that bottomed out with a 51-23 loss to the New England Patriots in Week 8 and a 55-14 thrashing at the hands of the Green Bay Packers just two weeks later on Sunday Night Football.

In firing Trestman and Emery, the McCaskeys are acknowledging the disaster that was the 2014 season. Offensive coordinator Aaron Kromer made headlines this month when it was revealed he was the source of disparaging comments made toward Cutler in the media. A plan to replace Cutler with Jimmy Clausen lasted just one week after Clausen suffered a concussion in a Week 16 game against the Detroit Lions.

Trestman wasn't the sole source of the Bears' problems, of course. He wasn’t the one who handed Cutler a monster contract that weighed down the franchise nor was he the one who failed to draft any difference-makers on defense, instead relying on expensive and aging free agents like Jared Allen.

He wasn’t the one who, well, hired himself.

Whichever GM and coach inherit the franchise will have to retool both sides of the ball, which is no easy task considering the amount of money that has been committed to the offense. The Bears have the seventh pick in next spring's NFL draft and must replenish a defense that has been among the NFL's worst the past two seasons.

Trestman, who will turn 59 on Jan. 15, should be fine. He’ll get paid for the two years that remain on his Bears contract and should still be in demand in the league as either an assistant coach or offensive adviser.

But after waiting so long for an NFL team to take a chance on his quiet and reserved approach, Trestman’s first head coaching opportunity will likely be his last.