HOUSTON — For myriad reasons, an extra heaviness seemed to linger in the air inside the visiting locker room at NRG Stadium late Sunday night. The Chicago Bears were not only processing their first loss this season — a 19-13 clunker against the Houston Texans on a prime-time stage. They also seemed to be seeking coping strategies.
“It’s only Week 2,” tight end Cole Kmet said, reminding himself and anyone who would listen to find perspective in the days ahead. “I don’t want to freak out here. We have 15 more games left. It’s a long season with a whole lot of ball left.”
Running back D’Andre Swift took a similar approach, even as he acknowledged the obvious disappointment.
“We’ve got to get better,” Swift said. “We’ve got a lot to clean up. But it’s Week 2. It’s just Week 2.”
Bears coach Matt Eberflus, meanwhile, pushed for a forward-looking mindset from his team.
“We’re all disappointed in the loss,” he said. “And we should be. But I told the guys, in the NFL, it’s how you respond that matters.”
Still, something about the way Sunday’s defeat came about and the sloppiness that defined it felt like it had really left a mark.
This wasn’t just a loss against a quality opponent, an established playoff team that seems to be riding the NFL’s escalator right now. It’s a game the Bears could have won had they played with even ordinary sharpness.
In fact, with a little more than a minute to play, they had the ball near midfield with their chance to save an ugly night, down only six points and beginning their final drive with their longest completion of the season to date — Caleb Williams to Rome Odunze for 27 yards.
But with the way the night had gone, the final four plays did not register as even a little bit surprising.
A sack. A penalty. Two harmless incompletions.
Ballgame.
That put the punctuation on a second-half performance in which the Bears managed just 114 yards, eight first downs and three points on eight possessions.
It finished a messy performance in which the offense committed eight penalties (with seven accepted) while Bears running backs averaged only 1.6 yards per carry. It ended a loss in which Williams was sacked seven times, hit 11 others and threw the first two interceptions of his NFL career.
Yikes.
Inside that visiting locker room at NRG Stadium, with that aforementioned heaviness in the air, Williams sat for a while and stared, trying to soak in everything that had happened.
“We didn’t come out with the win,” he said. “We didn’t execute when we needed to as a team. For myself, throwing interceptions is not something I’ve done, not something I do. Those are the things I’m most frustrated about.”
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Derek Stingley Jr. goes up and intercepts Caleb Williams
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— NFL (@NFL) September 16, 2024
Williams’ first interception, late in the third quarter, was a calculated shot play, a 50-50 ball to DJ Moore, who used an inside release to break deep against cornerback Derek Stingley Jr. But when Williams’ pass descended, Stingley won the play.
“I tried to give my guy a chance,” Williams said. “But then the DB cut up under him and made a good play on the ball. That was that.”
On the next possession, Williams showed special elusiveness in slipping away from a sack by Danielle Hunter, extending a play with a rollout to his right. But in his attempt to deliver a tide-turning magic trick, the Bears quarterback forced a ball toward Kmet into triple coverage down the right sideline.
Kamari Lassiter quickly became the primary receiver and capitalized on a rookie mistake.
“Caleb has to be careful with the football after he gets out (of the pocket) and when he throws the ball in a scramble drill,” Eberflus said. “So some great learning moments there for him in terms of the pressure, of what to do and when to do it. We’ll look at the tape and get those things corrected.”
Perhaps, for some Bears players, that heaviness inside the locker room late Sunday had something to do with how familiar this loss felt, with the offense failing to capitalize on another strong outing by the defense and squandering a bushel full of golden opportunities.
In the trivia department, Sunday marked the Bears’ 10th consecutive road loss on “Sunday Night Football.” Far more significant, it seemed to expose the Bears’ offensive line as a unit that needs to make drastic improvements quickly to enliven playoff aspirations in Chicago.
On Sunday night, the Bears offense consistently lost the battle at the line of scrimmage. Hunter and Will Anderson each had 1 1/2 sacks and two quarterback hits for the Texans. Houston also held Swift to 18 yards on 14 carries and renewed questions about why a running attack that everyone at Halas Hall felt so optimistic about during training camp is suddenly so inadequate.
“I don’t know what’s missing,” Kmet said. “I really want to take a close look at it on tape and see where we’re at with it.”
Added center Coleman Shelton: “We’ll go study this and do our best to come back out next week and run the ball as well as we can.”
Chicago Bears cornerback Kyler Gordon almost makes an interception during the third quarter against the Houston Texans on Sunday, Sept. 15, 2024, in Houston. (Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune)It isn’t helping that penalty issues are also weighing the offense down. Included in Sunday’s blunder fest were four false starts and — most astounding — a delay of game penalty coming out of a TV timeout after a possession change in the third quarter.
“When you’re playing against a team like this, a playoff team on the road, you have to play clean,” Swift said. “When you keep getting behind the sticks, that stuff adds up for sure.”
To add to the sloppiness, Eberflus incorrectly — and unwisely — lost both his replay challenges Sunday. One was a 21-yard Stefon Diggs reception in which the Texans receiver clearly had both feet down and the other was a near-interception from Bears cornerback Kyler Gordon during which the football scraped the turf without Gordon cleanly possessing it.
It was just that kind of night for the Bears, with the heaviness of it all requiring deeper reflection. That was particularly so for offensive players starting to feel the stress of having only one touchdown on 23 possessions so far this season.
Moore, who had six catches for 53 yards Sunday, was asked what specifically he found most frustrating.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe everything. We’d get the ball in good field position and not capitalize. That’s on us. … Right now we’re still building our puzzle together. So until we get that puzzle fully complete, it’s going to be an up-and-down road.”
Added Kmet: “It’s frustrating. It is. And it feels like I’ve had this talk for a few years now. We understood this would be a process a little bit. But we have a lot of work ahead. The reality of the NFL is settling in on us a little offensively. So we have to regroup.”
The urgency of those efforts is now obvious. The heaviness of Sunday’s loss was too.