Chicago Bears are shocking the NFL….(Justin Field, Matt…
The Chicago Bears Are the Bleakest Team in Recent NFL History
The Bears’ situation, though, is soapier than that. Players are saying things into microphones that call into question if they’re on the same page with their coaches. One of those coaches has already resigned under nonfootball pretenses. The franchise player who showed some real promise last year has looked as bad as ever. The general manager has already had to sit on a podium and assure the Chicago press that the organization has not devolved into a state of total chaos, but the present evidence points to the contrary. To look at the Bears right now is to look at a good, old-fashioned professional sports meltdown, the type opposing fans dream about but rarely get such a public look at. And what a spectacle it is.
In a vacuum, it’s not surprising that the team’s on-field product is bad. The Bears posted the NFL’s worst record at 3–14 in 2022, and this isn’t a sport in which anyone goes worst-to-first. But the Bears were supposed to be a good bit better this season, in part because they didn’t run their offseason like a typical worst team in the league. They traded the No. 1 draft pick to the Carolina Panthers (also currently winless) for a minor ransom and used the trade return to help Fields, Chicago’s former first-round pick who’d be entering his third year. Most excitingly, in addition to a bushel of very high draft picks, general manager Ryan Poles brought in wideout D.J. Moore, one of the most consistent pass-catchers in football. And they got Fields some protectors in both free agency and the draft. The plan made a lot of sense, and betting markets estimated they’d win six or seven games
It hasn’t come close to panning out. Despite last season’s progress, Fields was spectacularly bad in the season’s opening three losses. He was a bit of an interception dispenser as a passer, and the Bears made the schematic calculation to use Fields sparingly in the area where he most excels: as a runner. For the most part, Chicago removed designed QB-run plays from Fields’ menu, and he hasn’t been nearly effective enough throwing the ball to make that worthwhile. Fields did have a serious passing day against the Broncos, and the Bears seemed to scheme up a lot of open receivers for him. But as the day wore on, the offense stalled anyway, and now the Bears have lost 14 games in a row dating to 2022. At least there’s now a little kernel of recent Fields success
In some ways, coach Matt Eberflus is having the standard experience that one has when he’s won three games in well over a year of coaching an NFL team. He’s dissembling at press conferences about what’s wrong, and a lot of fans would like him to get fired. Ordinary stuff. But the Bears are going on two weeks in a row of players giving quotes to reporters that don’t exactly sound like they believe in their coaches. Fields said before a blowout a few weeks ago that coaching was the reason he was playing in too “robotic” a fashion. Receiver Chase Claypool, asked last week if the Bears’ coaches were putting him in the best position to succeed, started his answer to a reporter: “No.” The Bears acquired Claypool from the Steelers last year in exchange for what wound up being the 32nd pick in the draft, and he’s produced virtually nothing for his new team. They made him a healthy scratch on Sunday, told reporters Claypool had decided to stay home and skip the game, and then said that the team had actually told the wideout to stay away from Soldier Field. The Bears look poised to trade Claypool for scraps or do whatever they can to get him off their roster.
That is the offense. But the defensive situation is arguably even worse, in part because coordinator Alan Williams resigned in the middle of September. Williams said he was “taking a step back to take care of my health and family.” However, ESPN reported that Williams’ departure stemmed from “inappropriate activity” that came onto the radar of the team’s human resources department. The Bears have given up the second-most points in the league (137), but the fact that they’re within 13 points of the Broncos for the very worst is a significant achievement given that there have only been four games and Denver gave up 70 points in one of those. Poles, the GM, has already conducted a surprise midweek press conference that included him saying the following words, which executives ideally would not have to say: “No one in our building is panicking.” Perhaps not, but the Bears have lost two more games since then. Things seem grim.
Still, because of a mix of the Bears’ dysfunction and one pretty sharp move by Poles amid all of this darkness, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. The draft pick trade they made last spring, preserving Fields as their starter for now, included Carolina’s first-rounder in 2024. In other words, there are two zero-win teams in the NFL, and the Bears control both of their first-round picks. The Bears could be in the preposterous position to make the first two picks in next year’s draft as a pairing, and if they are, it’ll be a tremendous year for it. USC quarterback Caleb Williams, the likely first overall pick, is a stone-cold, sure goddamned thing—an absolute magician of a young QB who even the Bears may not be able to mess up. If things proceed on their current trajectory, the Bears will decline the fifth-year option on Fields’ contract after this season, making 2024 his last year with the team, and then Williams will slide in. Or that’s at least one way things could go, and Bears fans deserve to dream so they can feel something other than pain.
Of course, OK, even Williams might not be an entirely sure thing in Chicago, though he should be pretty close to one. The Bears are the most QB-deprived franchise in league history, and it’s wholly possible that Williams will be the best quarterback the team has ever had before he even throws a pass. It’s also conceivable that the Bears are the kind of mess that NFL teams have a hard time being unless Daniel Snyder buys them, and messes like that are capable of snuffing out joy wherever it sprouts. Chicago is in the throes of a meltdown much worse than the garden-variety futility of a bad team, but teams have rebounded from worse. The Jacksonville Jaguars willingly turned over their franchise to Urban Meyer a few years ago, and they’re pretty decent now anyway, because the same thing that yielded their desperation to hire Meyer (their horrendous play) also yielded them a quarterback named Trevor Lawrence. At some point, even the NFL’s most pathetic teams fall into the soft cushions of success. The Bears are heading for another disaster season, and then their own ineptitude will square off with the NFL’s system that is designed to help the worst teams pick themselves up. Messier franchises have, after all, gotten it together, and the Bears can, too. Maybe.