Matt Nagy slipped into his first-class sleeper seat with a scowl on his face, a grim outing at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium on his mind and a long, transcontinental flight in his immediate future. A few seconds later Nagy, the Chicago Bears’ second-year head coach, surveyed the layout of the Airbus A350-1000, realized what was staring him in the face — and felt as if veins were popping out of his neck.
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The previous night, on the first Sunday of October 2019, the Bears had suffered a 24-21 defeat to the Oakland Raiders. Nagy, normally upbeat and composed, had gone on an all-time tirade. His team trailing 17-0 at halftime, Nagy became unhinged in the locker room, directing his ire at his offensive linemen and loudly questioning their manhood. “You’re playing like a bunch of (wimps),” Nagy screamed, vaulting over a previously uncrossed line.
Not surprisingly, the linemen didn’t take it well. “I was one more insult away from pushing past our head of security and walking the streets of London, in uniform, trying to find the best pub possible to watch the second half,” recalls Kyle Long, then a Bears starting guard. “I don’t use the ‘Q’ word (quit) lightly, but I was close.”
Long was still upset the next morning when he took his first-class seat in the vicinity of his fellow linemen. So was Nagy, whose wife, Stacey, had accompanied him on the trip. It was then that all parties were confronted with an awkward realization: The Nagys were sitting directly across from the aggrieved linemen, as they had been on the outbound flight from Chicago.
“On the flight out,” Long says, “we were taking pictures like kids on Snapchat. On the way back, we were going to a wake. For nine hours, I challenge you not to make eye contact with the person across from you. I had to stare at my knees. It was torture.”
Remembers Nagy: “They had those seats that go in opposite directions. Nine hours of staring at each other. Nine hours of me glaring at them. We didn’t talk. I was pissed and they were pissed. That was just a weird moment. London’s dreary. The food stunk. You’re hangry. And (at halftime) I just lost my f—— mind.”
Nagy, now the Kansas City Chiefs’ offensive coordinator, may not have fond memories of that trip across the pond, but his uncharacteristic tantrum, which he and Long both laugh about now, was emblematic of an NFL voyage that has left more than a few franchises knackered and worse for the wear. At times, what’s gone down in the UK has been pretty far from OK. Since 2007, when the league began staging regular season games in London, many other Americans have lost their minds — and, in the games’ immediate aftermath, their jobs.
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Last year, the New York Jets fired Robert Saleh after a loss to the Minnesota Vikings, which made Saleh the latest member of the Done After London club, but hardly the most scandalous. The previous year, two Buffalo Bills executives got the axe shortly after returning from England because they were engaged in a professionally unethical romantic relationship in conspicuous fashion.
With the Broncos and Jets set to meet Sunday at Tottenham Hotspur, the second of three London games on this season’s schedule, there should be at least a tiny bit of trepidation that someone will slip into the snake pit and become the latest NFL personality to make a forgettable
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