This can’t continue. The Chicago Bears can’t go on like this. They can’t keep producing this brand of lousy, uninspired, miserable football.
It’s just not productive. Not healthy. Not justifiable.
On Sunday, the Bears entered Soldier Field to play an ideal get-well opponent in the 2-7 New England Patriots but left the lakefront with a 19-3 loss that wasn’t nearly as close as the score might have indicated. Even less entertaining too.
Gross. Embarrassing. Inept.
One of the worst teams in the NFL came to town, didn’t play all that well and departed with just its second victory in the last 62 days. And the Patriots didn’t break much of a sweat either.
They never trailed. They outgained the Bears by 186 yards. They seemed surprised, almost, that there wasn’t more resistance.
This can’t continue. It just can’t. Not without some sort of significant change.
So now what? What’s the move for the Bears? A change in offensive play-caller? The firing or demotion of offensive coordinator Shane Waldron?
Something even more drastic?
“We’ll look at everything,” Bears coach Matt Eberflus said. “I think it’s looking at everything, from the top to the bottom, making sure that we’re finding the answers to move the ball down the field and play better as a football team on offense, defense and special teams.”
If the Bears are looking at everything, let’s lay it all out on that Halas Hall conference table then. Piece by unfathomable piece.
- Since returning from London and emerging from their Week 7 bye, the Bears offense has had 34 possessions. They have scored only 27 points.
- The Bears’ drought since their last visit to the end zone is at 23 possessions. And counting.
- Over the last 34 drives, the Bears have scored just two touchdowns. They’ve punted 19 times.
- On Sunday, the Bears had the ball for 11 series and squeezed out just one field goal.
- Since the bye week, the Bears have held the lead for 25 seconds. Total. Those were the final 25 ticks of the game in Washington when they had a 15-12 lead and an inside track on improving to 5-2. We all know what happened next.
The Bears are 4-5. They’re backsliding. Their belief seems to be receding. The mood is dour.
“Disappointed,” safety and team captain Kevin Byard said. “Frustrated. We didn’t play well today. At all.”
But is there still faith from inside the locker room in the leadership of the coaching staff?
“I’m not going to go there,” Byard responded. “At the end of the day, we have to play better. And we have to win. … We have to find a way as a team to figure out the formula to win ballgames.”
Fair enough.
Then let’s get back to that table where everything is being laid out.
- Eberflus is 14-29 midway through his third season as Bears coach.
- The Bears are about to dive into NFC North play next week, with three consecutive division games to begin a stretch in which they’ll play six division contests in a span of eight games. Eberflus is 2-10 against the NFC North.
- Rookie quarterback Caleb Williams? He was a mess Sunday. Sacked nine times. Sixty-nine net passing yards. Not so nice. Against a bottom-10 defense.
- Eberflus labeled the offensive ineptitude “an everybody thing,” citing protection leaks, poor rhythm and timing from the quarterback and inconsistent route discipline from the pass catchers. “It’s all that at the same time.”
- With the league’s 27th-ranked third-down defense in attendance, the Bears failed on 13 of their 14 third-down tries.
- That came one week after the Bears went 3-for-14 on third down against the Arizona Cardinals and two weeks after a 2-for-12 effort against the Washington Commanders.
- Williams finished 16-for-30 for 120 yards. Over his last three games, he has a passer rating of 64.7.
- The quarterback’s last touchdown pass came 28 days ago. In London.
This isn’t the kind of developmental arc a franchise wants with the No. 1 pick in the draft. So might Williams benefit from a shake-up in the leadership above him? If necessary, would he be able to adapt midway through his rookie season to a different play-caller if Waldron is pushed aside in favor of, say, passing game coordinator Thomas Brown?
“I mean, they’re not going to reinvent the wheel in that sense,” Williams said. “We’re in midseason. And yeah, that’s not a decision for me. I have to do what Coach says. Whatever decision he makes, I have to be fine with it.
“Would I be able to adapt? Yes, I will. We’ll be able to adapt to whatever decision Coach makes. And from there, we’ll have to go out and execute in games.”
This table is still big enough for more, right? For everything, as Eberflus promised? That’s the only way the Bears are going to get a complete assessment of where they are now and how astoundingly far it is from where they thought they could go. So let’s continue.
- The Bears were without three Week 1 starters on their offensive line. A fourth lasted just 20 offensive plays. Tackles Braxton Jones and Darnell Wright were ruled out Friday with knee injuries. Nate Davis woke up with back tightness Sunday, was designated as out and promptly sent home. Then Teven Jenkins suffered an ankle injury with 9 minutes, 58 seconds remaining in the first half. So much for providing comfort to a rookie quarterback.
- If the Bears had hoped to use a bruising running game to fuel a rebound victory, those wishes disintegrated. D’Andre Swift turned 16 carries into 59 yards. The Bears’ 73 total yards on the ground marked the fourth time this season they have been held below 80.
- The Bears offense never visited the red zone. They ran only one play from inside the Patriots 30. Fittingly, it was a run for minus-2 yards that preceded an 8-yard sack on a drive that somehow ended with a punt that netted 19 yards. Ick.
- After the game’s only turnover — an interception by Bears linebacker T.J. Edwards near midfield late in the first quarter — the Bears offense went three-and-out.
- In the second half, the Bears ran only two plays from inside Patriots territory. One resulted in a sack. The other was an incomplete pass.
- The Bears managed 142 total yards against a Patriots defense that came into the game allowing 361.4 per game. They scored just three points against a defense that was allowing an average of 24.1.
- Of the Bears 59 offensive plays, 13 went for negative yardage, 14 others for no gain.
- The Bears had four more false starts. They have 19 this season.
- The Bears’ longest play was an 18-yard Williams completion to DJ Moore on the first snap after halftime. Their second-longest gain? A roughing-the-passer foul against Patriots linebacker Jahlani Tavi with two minutes left in a blowout.
That’s the entire log of Bears snaps that went for at least 15 yards.
“We have to look at everything,” Eberflus repeated. “That’s a fundamental part of it. We need a spark in there. We need to be able to move the ball.”
Maybe the ugliest and most telling sequence of the game came in the final 7:17 before halftime. The game was tied at that point. But the Patriots marched 70 yards on 10 plays to take the lead for good on a Drake Maye touchdown pass to Ja’Lynn Polk.
Still, the Bears were due to get the ball first after halftime. So a strong close to the first half followed by a sharp start to the third quarter could have put them back in the lead. Or at least tightened the game.
But the offense seized again. Five plays for 6 yards in 1:11. Punt.
The Patriots turned that gift into a double-digit lead with a two-minute scoring drive. On a gusty afternoon at Soldier Field, Joey Slye’s 37-yard kick was shortened by 5 yards, too, after Bears defensive end Montez Sweat — in a clock-killing situation — couldn’t get back across the line of scrimmage or back to the Bears sideline. Offsides.
So much for situational sharpness.
“We need to play better there,” Eberflus said.
Oh, well.
This is just who these Bears are right now. And even with a defense allowing an average of just 18.6 points per game, there’s intense fatigue setting in.
“When you lose three straight,” Byard said, “it’s definitely a snowball. It’s not a great feeling. It’s not something we planned to do. It’s not something we expected. But with the situation we’re in, we have to find a way out of it.
“If I had the answers, we would be winning.”
Moore seemed equally perplexed, unable to explain the dismal performance.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t put it into words. It’s a difficult loss. So it’s back to the drawing board and (we need to) just be real with ourselves.”
By this point, that drawing board is pretty worn.
This can’t continue. The Bears can’t go on like this.
If everything is truly on the table, general manager Ryan Poles must assess all this locker-room dejection triggered by so much repeated failure and determine whether Eberflus has lost the buy-in of his team.
Sunday’s performance sure seemed to show a group that had lost its juice. And quite possibly its hope. Put all that on the table too.
“We can’t splinter,” Moore said. “We can’t grow apart right now and lay down. We just have to come together.”
Added Eberflus: “The only way to get this done is by pulling together. It’s not about pulling apart. There’s going to be a bunch of outside noise. And I told (the guys) that. But I said, ‘You know what we have to do? We have to pull together and find the answers. Because we have all the answers that we need in the room. And we have evidence of that on tape from in games.”
Not enough of it, though. And now the rival Green Bay Packers will be coming to town next weekend for a spotlight game, another measuring-stick moment for an organization that so frequently fails to measure up.
At some point, the quest to find answers must be accompanied by actual answers. The Bears can’t keep producing this brand of lousy, uninspired, miserable football. They can’t go on like this. This just can’t continue.
