Note to Bears: The Packers will be happy to end your season if you start slowly yet again in wild-card game
The Bears were DOA Sunday for a 19-16 regular-season-ending loss to the Lions at Soldier Field.
Down, out and abysmal?
Disinterested, obtuse and maybe even arrogant?
For three quarters, yes and yes.
Oh, yeah — dead on arrival, too?
No question about it.
“We came out a little flat, energy-wise, and I think we’ve got to do a better job of having urgency from the jump and getting it going,” quarterback Caleb Williams said after the Bears (11-6) managed not to dent the scoreboard with a single point until the fourth quarter of a game that seemingly should have mattered too much for such nonsense.
It was almost as though having the chance to lock up the No. 2 seed in the NFC playoffs wasn’t a big enough deal for the Bears. That the positive vibes that have come with a six-game home winning streak were expendable. That getting some payback against the Lions (9-8), who won the teams’ first game 52-21 in Detroit, could wait for next year. That finishing with yet another losing division record — despite winning the NFC North, the Bears still stumbled across the finish line at 2-4 — was just a forgettable detail.
On offense, in particular, the Bears didn’t bother to show up until their backs were completely against the wall. It was 16-0 by the time they deigned to clock in for work.
“We can’t dig ourselves in a hole like that,” coach Ben Johnson said. “I was disappointed with the offense as a whole.”
The Lions already are packing for the offseason. A team that outscored the Bears over the course of the season, defended the run better and stopped the pass better — and beat the Bears twice, once in monstrous fashion — is old news. Maybe the wrong team is carrying the torch for the division?
The division is long overdue for a postseason success story. The NFC North has zero Super Bowl wins since the 2010 Packers and hasn’t even put a team into the Super Bowl in that time.
“We’re going into the playoffs here and we’ve got to find ways to be better,” Williams said. “The focus has to level up, the urgency has to level up, the play has to level up, the mindset and mentality on the field has to level up, because that’s what playoff football is.”
Man, that’s a lot of leveling up. Perhaps Step 1 should be showing up.
“We’re going to have to pick it up,” Johnson said. “I get fired up just thinking about it.”
In next come the Packers in the wild-card round, but you knew that already.
The Packers, people.
What could be bigger than that?
“I feel good about us vs. anybody,” Williams said.
As concerning as the Bears’ trend of slow starts is becoming, and as imperfect as it was to back into a division championship despite last week’s loss to the 49ers and then back into the No. 2 seed despite the loss to the Lions, a playoff game against the Packers resets everything.
Lose to the Packers in only the second playoff game between the mega-rivals since 1941, and it’s the sourest imaginable end to a successful season. But win, and the question becomes how much rivalry misery might Bears fans instantly be able to shed from their consciousness? The 11 straight losses against the Packers from 2019 to 2024? The 1-9 stretch from 2013 to 2018, too? Dare we even mention the 1-9 stretch from 2009 to 2012?
No, one playoff win — no matter how much Schadenfreude it brings to our city — won’t come close to offsetting all that. Still, Bears fans need this in the worst way, having lived through three-plus decades of abject humiliation at the hands of their tormentors.
Out of 65 tries since the start of the 1994 season, how many times have the Bears beaten the Packers? Try 15. That’s the same number of times coach Mike Ditka beat the Packers from 1983 to 1992. After Ditka, Dave Wannstedt went 1-11, Dick Jauron 2-8, Lovie Smith 8-11, Marc Trestman 1-3, John Fox 1-5, Matt Nagy 1-7 and Matt Eberflus 0-4.
Johnson’s Bears are 1-1 against the Packers, but now they have the opportunity to take the rivalry in a new direction. Just imagine what that would do to Packers fans — if they came to fear the Bears in Baraboo, to feel inferior in Superior, to cry “Oh, gosh!” in Oshkosh.
But the Bears better hit the ground running in this next one. If they don’t, Packers QB Jordan Love, who will be back from a concussion sustained last time he met the Bears, will gladly put the division upstarts in another hole.
At no time Sunday did the Bears offense look less into it than when it had a chance to “double-dip” going into and out of halftime. Instead, the Bears treated it like an invitation to slow-dance on a fast-darkening Lake Shore Drive. They said no thanks and scored zip, zilch, nada, when any points at all might have led them to a comeback win that would've felt so much better.
Damn right, it’s time to level up.
Or else it’ll be time to go down.