Chicago Bears head coach Matt Eberflus called his best wide receiver, DJ Moore, this past January with a request.
“Give me some insight on how you think Chris Beatty is as a man and a coach,” Eberflus said.
“I said he’s a great man. His family is amazing. He’s amazing,” Moore told The Athletic. “And on the coaching side, he’s going to be very detailed and he’s gonna get after it.”
Beatty coached Moore to Big Ten Wide Receiver of the Year honors at Maryland. He most recently coached receivers with the Los Angeles Chargers, where Mike Williams had his best season, and where Keenan Allen showed he could still be one of the league’s top receivers at this stage of his career.
When the Bears traded for Allen, he was put at ease when he knew that meant a reunion with his receivers coach.
“He’s one of the first guys I talked to, and just him being here made it a lot more comfortable, just not having to adjust to another guy who I’m going to see every day, who’s going to talk to me every day,” Allen said. “We already have an understanding of the way I go through the week. He knows how I want to practice. He knows when and when not to (push) me, so it’s great.”
Beatty, 51, is in his 14th coaching stop — second in the NFL — and will oversee the most talented group of receivers this franchise has seen.
“You can tell that he grew from college to the NFL,” Moore said. “Maryland to Pitt to the Chargers, where he had Keenan and Mike Williams, they both went for 1,000 yards and were Pro Bowl players. He had to be doing something right with the details. We all listen to him. He’s made a good impact on the room.”
In 2001, Joe Taylor, then the head coach at Hampton, invited Beatty to be one of his keynote speakers in Virginia Beach at a football clinic. Beatty was then a young high school football coach.
Beatty told the coaches the strategy he used at nearby Salem High School. He was going to throw the ball. A lot.
And he got heckled.
“That ain’t going to work on this side of the water,” he was told.
But Taylor noticed two things. One, Beatty didn’t lose his cool. Two, Beatty’s resume was undeniable.
“His record was just ridiculous,” Taylor said. “Each year he would come and be one of my keynote speakers for my football clinic. Very impressed with the overall scheme of things, but he always projected that the next year, he would win the championship again. Each year, he would go back and win it.
“I said, to hell with this, I’m going to go ahead and hire this guy because not only is his scheme solid, but he’s a great communicator with total confidence.”
GO DEEPER
Behind the scenes of Bears ‘Hard Knocks’ with the HBO crew at Halas Hall
Being doubted wasn’t new to Beatty. In 1998, he became the first Black head coach in the history of North Stafford High School in Virginia. He was 25, and it was his first coaching job.
“Meet the parents night was different,” he said. “Skepticism. But then we quickly kind of showed that we were ready for that job.”
He went 78-18 in eight seasons as a high school coach in Virginia, including three consecutive state title game appearances at Landstown High School with Percy Harvin at wide receiver.
That’s why Taylor invited Beatty and why he wanted to hire him. But Beatty declined the first offer, which was to be Hampton’s running backs coach. He had one more year with Harvin and fellow receiver Damon McDaniel and wanted to see it through.
The next year, Taylor came back. This time, he had an offensive coordinator job to offer Beatty.
Coach Chris Beatty guided Landstown High School to a state championship in 2004. (Lisa Billings / Associated Press)
Taylor coached for 50 years — 44 in the college ranks. He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 2019. He spent 16 seasons at Hampton.
“I recognized talent when I saw it,” he said.
Taylor, whose first college coaching job came at Eastern Illinois with the offensive-minded Mike Shanahan, always served as head coach and play caller, until he hired Beatty, a 33-year-old, first-time college coach.
“He was really the first one I felt comfortable with allowing him to just take it and run with it,” Taylor said. “Needless to say, he did a great job.”
Even in the college ranks, Beatty’s proclivity to throw the ball was going to be an adjustment.
“I always ran the ball myself. I didn’t even pass on the highway,” Taylor said with a laugh. “When I hired him, it was a concern because, old-school football just say, three yards and a cloud of dust. Most of us came out of that era. It was just sound football back in those days.
“For someone to think they could just throw it all over the place without running … That’s why I was so impressed with him and willing to see it through because this guy, year in and year out, his football team in high school, people knew he was going to throw it, but he was successful.”
GO DEEPER
‘An incredible story’: Why Kerry Joseph could be perfect for Caleb Williams, Bears QBs
In the season opener, Hampton’s first touchdown came on a 55-yard touchdown pass. The Pirates beat Grambling State in overtime 27-26. It’s the game Taylor cites when talking about Beatty — Hampton came back from 10 points down in the final three minutes to send it to overtime.
“He was the architect of that whole season,” Taylor said.
Hampton went 10-2, won the conference and had the seventh-best scoring offense in the FCS. And Beatty was off on a tour of eight FBS jobs over the next 14 seasons, starting with a running backs coaching job at Northern Illinois.
“I hated to see him go because I was so excited to work with him, but I was so happy for him,” Taylor said. “The sky was really the limit.”
There are two sides to Beatty’s resume. Stop after stop, receivers or running backs would set school and/or personal records, from Harvin in high school to Noel Devine and Tavon Austin at West Virginia to Jordan Matthews at Vanderbilt to Jared Abbrederis at Wisconsin to Moore to Maurice Ffrench at Pitt.
There’s also a list of nine college jobs in 14 seasons.
Beatty has had to change jobs. A lot. But that’s life in football, and not always a reflection of what his receivers or running backs accomplished.
When he was at West Virginia, Beatty’s neighbor mentioned to his wife the possibility of a new coach coming in and replacing Bill Stewart. She said to Beatty’s wife, “You’ll be fine. The running backs and the receivers are doing really good.”
“No, that’s not how it works,” Beatty said. “The new guys are going to bring in his guys. That is a rough part of the business.”
That’s a stress on the family, too. It’s been harder to pick up and move as Beatty’s son, Aaron, a high school football player, has gotten older. Beatty has always felt confident he’d get the next job, and he always has, but he’s been cognizant of what it means for his family.
“Now you’ve got to pack up all your stuff and take it somewhere else,” he said. “That part of it, it’s the unknown.”
Chris Beatty’s first NFL coaching job was with the Los Angeles Chargers, where he worked with wide receiver Keenan Allen. (Perry Knotts / Getty Images)
More stops, though, also mean more connections. Like the grad assistant whom Beatty got to know well at Northern Illinois, Brandon Staley. More than a decade later, when Staley got his first NFL head-coaching job, he hired Beatty to coach the Chargers’ wide receivers.
Along the coaching path, there isn’t necessarily some secret wide receiver trick that Beatty coaches. He’s known as being very detailed, but he prides himself on relationships.
“I always tell (my players), I’m a little bit different,” he said. “Because pro football is so transactional and I’m not really transactional … like, I love DJ. He’s like a part of our family. I feel the same way about Keenan.
“I think people play better when they care about the people they are playing with, and that’s a team or a coach altogether.”
At Maryland, Beatty knew his receiver was ready for the NFL. He told Moore that, but the NFL came back with a “go-back-to-school” grade. The head coach questioned Beatty, but he told Moore, “You’re good enough. These guys will see it.”
Six years later, Moore signed a $110 million contract extension with the Bears.
“(Beatty) wants to know everything about you,” Moore said. “Your family, and then getting to know who you are. Once he gets to know who you are, he knows how to coach you and how to have fun with you and when to be serious and when to get on you. That’s the main part of his coaching deal. He’s going to get to know you, then figure out how he can get after you to get the best out of you.”
GO DEEPER
Bears QB Caleb Williams shows playmaking skill, poise on third down in debut
It’s not only the stars who feel it. Take DeAndre Carter. He had bounced around the NFL, from 2018 to 2021 with four teams. He never hit 300 yards receiving in a season.
Then in 2022, with Beatty in Los Angeles, he set career-high marks with 46 catches for 538 yards and three touchdowns.
“That’s my guy,” Carter said. “Probably one of the reasons why I’m back here now. I had my best year of my career in L.A. with Coach Beatty as my receiver coach. … I think we’ve built a level of trust within each other. He knows I’m gonna be on top of my stuff. He knows primarily what my role has been throughout my career. If something happens on game day, somebody goes down or whatever it is, I’ve kind of been that guy to step in and fill in all the spots. He knows that I can do that and do that well.”
When Beatty discusses stops along his coaching journey, he always uses “we,” a habit that makes his wife, Kris, laugh.
“You’re a team. It’s not about an individual,” he said. “I look at every stop as us as a group, or we, and then the team is us as a team. It’s not about me. It’s always about what we can do as a group. That’s always going to be the way I look at it. As long as I’m doing it, it’s always going to be we.”
Chris Beatty has moved around a lot for coaching jobs, but he knows it’s not about him: “It’s always about what we can do as a group.” (Courtesy of the Chicago Bears)
One of Beatty’s traits that has stuck with Taylor is the coach’s demeanor. Beatty is soft-spoken and patient, Taylor said, and that has resonated with his players.
“He’s not one of those slam-the-clipboard-on-the-ground or jump into a young man’s face when there’s an error,” Taylor said.
That quality also reflects a difference between the offense and defense.
“Defensive guys are supposed to be aggressive or loud,” Taylor said. “To me, he had the perfect mentality because offense is a chess game. It’s a thinking man’s game. … From an offensive standpoint, you’re always two or three plays down the road from that play you’re calling now. I loved his demeanor and his ability to stay on sequence.”
Beatty’s first opportunity to call plays at the college level was successful at Hampton. He had to wait six years for his next offensive coordinator opportunity, this time in a shared role at the University of Illinois in 2012, but he was fired after the season.
GO DEEPER
Bears 53-man roster projection: How camp injuries impact position battles
At Virginia three years later, Beatty was assistant head coach and running backs coach. He was promoted to associate head coach and co-offensive coordinator at Maryland in 2018. He’s on Year 4 in the NFL, and like anyone in his spot who has coached as long as he has, Beatty does hope to call plays again, this time at the highest level. He talked about “trying to soak up as much as I can” from Joe Lombardi and Kellen Moore in Los Angeles, and now Shane Waldron with the Bears.
“You can never stop learning,” he said. “But you’re also looking for an opportunity … to do it, and those things don’t change. Your aspirations are still what they are, but you want to do a great job. Coach (Eberflus) talks about it. And, you know, I’ve always believed that, be where your feet are. And that’s really what I’m trying to do is just be where my feet are. Be the best receiver coach I can possibly be. And then when that opportunity presents itself, try to maximize that if you get an opportunity.”
Eberflus is a good example. He spent 16 years in the college ranks, then nine years in the NFL before getting to be a play caller in Indianapolis in 2018 when he was 48.
Beatty’s receivers room will be the talk of the town this season, featuring two stars whose connections to him should be critical to success. Take it from his Hall of Fame mentor. After 30 years as a college head coach, Taylor has been the athletic director at Virginia Union since 2013, in his sixth decade in the world of football coaching.
“He has exhibited the kinds of ingredients that are necessary for success,” Taylor said. “That quiet demeanor, the work ethic. He was the first one in the office, last one to leave.
“His ability to recognize talent and then once he recognized the talent, he always had the ability to improve talent. He makes people better.”
(Top photo: Michael Reaves / Getty Images)
