Much changes from year to year in the NFL. New players make an impact, new teams make the playoffs, and new coaches make their mark. There are always your perennial contenders, such as the Chiefs, Bills and Eagles, and likewise, there are quite a few franchises around the NFL that have become conditioned to losing.
Sadly, Chicago Bears fans know what category their favorite team fits into. The Monsters of the Midway haven't lived up to their nickname in a long time, and yet somehow, this season feels worse. The Bears had real expectations this year after a host of offseason moves which included drafting Caleb Williams and Rome Odunze, trading for Keenan Allen and signing D'Andre Swift. Little has gone to plan though, and after firing head coach Matt Eberflus and then being thrashed on Sunday at the hands of the San Francisco 49ers, the Bears may have hit a new rock bottom.
We tried to find some silver linings yesterday, but this is not an optimistic time for fans of one of the NFL's charter franchises. Bears fans see the joy exhibited by other fanbases around the league as they win games and clinch playoff spots. Even within the NFC North, the Detroit Lions have gone from laughingstock of the league to certified juggernaut. Is it too much to ask for a little of that happiness for ourselves?
Lions fans have been rewarded for enduring decades of putrescence, and Bears fans hope that their time is coming soon, too. For now though, there isn't much to do except to wait until next year. The Bears are 4-9 and already have last place in the division sewn up, they need to hire a new head coach (and possibly a new general manager?), and there are glaring areas of need on both sides of the ball.
A national TV audience will be subjected to the Bears in Week 15, because the team is traveling to Minnesota to face the Vikings on Monday Night Football. That's bad news for football fans at large, and worse news for Bears fans that now have an extra day to stew about how everything has gone wrong this season.
I wish we could tackle our news of the week on a higher note, but this is the unfortunate reality for Bears fans right now. We are straight up not having a good time, but that's OK, because we hold on to the hope that one day it will all be worth it.
Bears forced to take accountability for 49ers loss
If there's one positive to emerge from the blowout to the 49ers, it's that it has forced everyone in the organization to take accountability. The Bears and their fans have been able to throw blame around for weeks now, first to former offensive coordinator Shane Waldron, and then to Eberflus. The team's problems clearly run deeper.
If anyone thought that firing Eberflus would be the panacea to cure everything that ailed the Bears, they were quickly disabused of that notion on Sunday. The 49ers stomped the Bears from the very outset, racing out to a 24-0 halftime lead that felt even worse in light of the 319-4 first-half yards disparity. Yes, you read that right.
Interim head coach Thomas Brown preached the importance of playing with physicality in the week leading up to the game, but the Bears were pushed around all afternoon in Levi's Stadium. After the game, Brown had no choice but to admit, "We got our butts kicked."
Caleb Williams was sacked seven times in the game, and he expressed the same sentiment in a slightly harsher tone, saying, "We got our ass kicked today and there's no way around it."
Montez Sweat recognized that the only way for the Bears to play better is to put in the work and play as a team. "Nobody's gonna save us," he said. "We're grown-ass men."
The Bears postgame locker room had a strikingly different vibe than some of the players gave off in the wake of Eberflus' firing. Sunday was a humbling experience, and the best evidence yet that instead of pointing fingers at others, the Bears should have been pointing them back at themselves.
Brown met with reporters virtually on Monday, and while he acknowledged that everyone from the coaches to the players could have been better in last week's loss, he also was clear that he expects the team to improve going forward, saying, “We don’t have cowards in the locker room. We don’t have cowards on our coaching staff, and so regardless of circumstance, we will come to battle every single day.” We'll see if that translates into a better effort on Monday night.
The Bears still have a long way to go to match the franchise's worst losing streak, but it's not as impossible as it may seem
Sunday's game was the seventh straight loss for the Bears, a truly shocking development when you consider that the team was 4-2 and one well-defended Hail Mary away from being 5-2. The team has never fully recovered from the shock of that loss to the Commanders, and now has the third-longest active losing streak in the NFL, behind the Raiders (nine games) and the Giants (eight games).
It may feel like the end of the world for Bears fans, but it wasn't that long ago that the team set the franchise record for consecutive losses with a whopping 14 straight from 2022-23. That streak spanned two seasons, and if this team is going to match that number, it will need to lose its final four games of this season and the first three next year.
We don't yet know what next season's schedule will look like, but that scenario is not as improbable as it may seem thanks to a brutal closing stretch this season. The Bears' final four opponents have a combined record of 40-12, and all four would be in the playoffs if the season ended today.
The Bears are touchdown underdogs to the Vikings this week, and will certainly be big dogs against the Lions and Packers. Even though they host the Seahawks in Week 17, Seattle will almost surely be favored in that game too because of how well they're playing lately.
If the Bears can't find a way to beat the Vikings on Monday night, they'll be tied for the second-longest losing streak in franchise history. Lose again to the Lions the following week and they'll have second place all to themselves.
Bears draft outlook begins to come into focus
For Bears fans that are already turning their attention to next year's draft (and who could blame them), there's good news and bad news. The good news is that the Bears are the only 4-9 team in the NFL, so they currently have the ninth pick. The bad news is that Chicago is on the wrong end of the tiebreaker against literally every single team in the league, meaning if the Bears finish with the same record as another team, the Bears will get the worse pick.
It seems likely at this point that the Bears won't win another game this season, or possibly one at the most. Losing out would be good from the perspective of ninth being the absolute worst pick the Bears could then have. To move higher, though, is going to take some luck.
The Patriots, Panthers, Jaguars, Titans, Jets and Browns are all 3-10, but because the Bears have and will have the tougher strength of schedule, they'll need these teams to win at least two games to have any chance of passing them in the draft order.
This is a ragtag bunch, but a few of these teams have shown signs of life. The Patriots like what they've seen from rookie Drake Maye, and they'll be fresh off their bye when they travel to Arizona to take on the suddenly hapless Cardinals. The final three weeks of New England's schedule feature two games with the Bills and one with the Chargers though, so two wins seems extremely unlikely.
The Panthers have looked much better in recent weeks as Bryce Young has finally shown signs of life. They nearly beat the Eagles this past week, and their closing schedule of home against the Cowboys and Cardinals and at the Bucs and Falcons is very reasonable. Bears fans should still be rooting against Carolina though, because they hold the Panthers' second-round pick and want it to be as high as possible.
The Jaguars have the easiest remaining schedule in the league, but they're so bad that it may not matter. Trevor Lawrence is out for the year, and Mac Jones has led the team to 43 points combined in the last four games. Can they beat two of the Jets, Raiders, Titans and Colts? Possibly, but man those are going to be some ugly games.
The Titans lost to the Jaguars on Sunday, so there doesn't seem to be much hope of them mustering two more wins, even against a relatively soft remaining slate of opponents in the Bengals, Colts, Jags and Texans. Same for the Jets, who keep finding new ways to lose and still have to face the Rams, Bills, and Dolphins after they play the Jags this week.
The Browns have been feisty since Jameis Winston has taken over, but it hasn't translated much to the win column. They get the Chiefs, Bengals, Dolphins and Ravens to finish the year. I'm not seeing two wins there.
If the Bears do manage to win another game, there's no way they can hope to pass any of these teams, and they'd be in jeopardy of falling behind the five-win Saints, Bengals and Cowboys.
We're going to predict that the Bears do lose out, and one of the three-win teams stumbles their way into a couple of wins thanks to a team resting their starters in Week 18, giving the Bears the eighth pick.