Across nine seasons in the NFL, Chicago Bears safety Kevin Byard has never missed a game. Regular season, playoffs, 145 straight. Byard has tasted victory 80 times during his career. But of the 65 times he has experienced defeat, none was quite as painful as last weekend’s steel-toed boot to the you-know-where.
With 25 seconds remaining, the Bears led the Washington Commanders 15-12, needing only for their proven defense to protect 76 yards and complete an exhilarating rally for the team’s fourth consecutive victory.
Wow. What a feeling.
But in a blink, it all unraveled, most significantly on Jayden Daniels’ final-play Hail Mary — 52 yards into a crowd, then tipped backward by Bears cornerback Tyrique Stevenson to uncovered receiver Noah Brown.
The prayer completion was one thing. But the Bears’ bungling of that final sequence created a whole different level of despair. Most jarring: Stevenson had his back turned to the action when the snap was taken, continuing to interact with fans in the stands more than four seconds into the play and then forgetting to shadow Brown. To top it all off, he then tried to do Byard’s designated job as the jumper, leaping above a sea of bodies outside the goal line and ultimately knocking the football into the end zone. To the man he was supposed to be covering.
Whoa. What a feeling.
“That was a game we needed to have,” Byard said from inside a stunned Bears locker room immediately after that 18-15 loss. “It was unbelievable. I’ve never been a part of a loss like that.”
The following day, Byard acknowledged again that he and his teammates weren’t navigating a typical “it’s just one loss” recovery process. Instead, Byard encouraged teammates to lean into the acceptance that the NFL’s oft-repeated and frequently used “24-hour rule” wasn’t one-size-fits-all.
“Maybe you need 36 hours,” Byard said. “We don’t have our first (practice) day until Wednesday. So maybe it’s 48. Just do what you need to do to get it out of your system. That’s what you do.”
That purging process has proved both challenging and delicate this week at Halas Hall, particularly as renewed concerns about coach Matt Eberflus’ leadership amplified in both the outside world and, to a lesser extent, within the Bears locker room.
Amid all the frustration, many of the team’s most respected leaders offered sharp criticism of Eberflus. There have also been multiple get-it-all-out meetings between the coach and his captains.
Now? There’s another game. Against the 4-4 Cardinals. With the Bears’ season reaching a significant intersection.
As linebacker Tremaine Edmunds so concisely put it: “I mean, Sunday comes fast.”
And fast it has come, pushing the Bears into another high-profile test of their resilience, focus and unity. At such a pivotal point in a promising season, the Bears once again have found themselves activating their crisis-management program.
Sunday’s performance may prove telling as to the effectiveness of their response.
“This is a determined group, a resilient group,” Eberflus said. “And we’ve got the right men in the locker room and the right men in the building to get that done.”
A fresh perspective
Let’s be clear: The Bears don’t need to squint all that hard to see a much more pleasant destination than the unsettled, perturbed, tension-filled place they’re standing at right now. Through the haze from this week’s aggravation; past Sunday’s very winnable game in Arizona; and then through a favorable Week 10 setup that will bring the last-place New England Patriots to Chicago, the Bears easily can envision landing in a spot where they are suddenly 6-3, suddenly feeling all those good vibrations again, suddenly preparing to face the rival Green Bay Packers in what essentially would be a retest of their ability to handle another bright lights, big-stage game.
Still, to get from there from here, the team will have to cross a long high wire over a treacherous canyon, remaining conscious of just how focused and precise they’ll need to be with every step over these next 10 days.
Eberflus refers to it as “wiring in on every play,” remaining cognizant — as the Bears were reminded Sunday — that every misstep can prove game-changing and ultimately season-altering if they’re not careful. But it stretches beyond that too. Which is why tight end and captain Cole Kmet made a public plea this week for teammates to “respect the game,” to handle every part of their preparation process with purpose and professionalism, to understand that the pursuit of excellence does not allow for lost focus or cut corners.
Sure, Kmet was intensely bothered by Stevenson’s lack of concentration and urgency on Sunday’s game-deciding final play. But he also, in a way, appreciated the karma of the end result.
“That’s the unfortunate (part),” Kmet said, “but I would also say the beauty of this game. It’s that if you disrespect it in a certain way, it will come to haunt you in some form or fashion.
“I think it’s a learning experience for everybody. We all play with a lot of passion. Tyrique plays with a lot of passion. And we all love him for that. But there’s definitely a respect level for the game, knowing that you’ve got to finish it out until those double-zeros hit the clock.”
Stevenson’s sincere apology in front of the entire team Monday was appreciated. But it also didn’t change Sunday’s result. And for an on-the-rise team playing in a difficult division and aware of its thin margin for error in the quest to reach the postseason, the difference between the 5-2 start the Bears had right in their hands and the 4-3 disappointment they’ve been coping with all week has been massive.
Said cornerback Jaylon Johnson: “We’re not at a point to where we can let games like that go. … Now we’re fighting to stay above .500.”
Cracks in the foundation
After all that has been expressed this week — with criticism of Eberflus’ coaching oversight spoken loudly and directly by some of the most respected locker-room leaders — there’s been a lot to unpack. At least half of the Bears’ eight captains have publicly called into question Eberflus moves that they felt hindered the team’s ability to win Sunday.
DJ Moore, like so many fans, wondered “what the hell happened” when the Bears chose “Fullback dive to offensive lineman Doug Kramer” as their top play call on first-and-goal from the 1 on a pivotal drive in the fourth quarter.
Byard wished the Bears had chosen to defend the Commanders’ penultimate completion — a 13-yarder from Daniels to Terry McLaurin that put them in better range for the Hail Mary. (The veteran safety shared those concerns first with Eberflus and then with reporters.)
Johnson wondered aloud why Eberflus didn’t use any of his three timeouts before the final play. Just to restore a sense of order and purpose with the game on the line.
“Really settle the moment down,” Johnson suggested again Wednesday. “My biggest thing was, I’m sure that if we were in the (NBA) Finals and we’ve got one more shot or one more possession, you are going to call a timeout to make sure the play is drawn up correctly. ‘We want to set this pick this way.’ I mean, get your guys in the best position to succeed. At the end of the day that doesn’t necessarily change the result. But it changes your mentality.”
All of that criticism, quite frankly, left two choices for interpretation. The first, through an optimistic lens, is that Bears captains remain united and highly driven and are simply capitalizing on their empowerment to speak up and take the lead in a productive player-coach troubleshooting effort.
Or, as many a scarred Chicago football skeptic might also surmise, perhaps it was a calculated cry for help from players who are questioning Eberflus’ ability to lead them where they want to go.
Johnson did little to dismiss that latter notion when he was asked directly what Eberflus needed to show to retain the players’ belief.
“How does he retain our belief? I mean, I feel like that is, quite honestly, part of our job as long as somebody is your head coach,” Johnson said. “It was the same thing, in a sense, with the quarterback situation last year when everybody asked, ‘Are you behind Justin (Fields)?’ Well, he is our quarterback. He is who we are going with.
“So whoever is in that position, whoever is in our locker room, whoever our coaches are, that is who we believe in. That’s who we trust to lead us to a championship.”
‘The players lead’
Byard was far more diplomatic, emphasizing that while he certainly had questions about specific decisions Eberflus made in the loss to the Commanders, that hadn’t triggered him to jump ship.
“I still believe in him as a coach,” Byard said. “I still believe in him as a man. And I respect that he lets us voice our opinions in these meetings. Because I have been on another team where that may not happen. But he has opened it up for feedback from players.”
Still, it has been easy to see that many of the Bears’ leaders have rushed to the helm this week to help steer their voyage back on course. As 22-year-old rookie quarterback Caleb Williams articulated Wednesday: “On OK teams, nobody leads. Good teams, the coaches lead. And with great teams, the players lead. We have to find ways to be better for ourselves.”
Williams didn’t intend that as some sort of damning indictment of Eberflus and his staff. More so, it was a call for collective ownership from players to be accountable for their own preparation habits and game-day execution.
On that front, Kmet insinuated that the preparation leading up to the Commanders game hadn’t met the appropriate standards, referencing “things done in the dark” as one area in which the Bears must show greater focus and dedication.
“If you’re in the weight room, are you doing all six reps or are you doing five reps and getting out of there?” Kmet said. “When you’re on the field, are you hitting the jugs (machine) after practice? Is your footwork correct during the walk-through? It’s those little things that can’t necessarily always be addressed by a coach or another teammate. But those are things that you do in the dark that really come to fruition on game day.”
‘We’ve got to win’
With 19 seasons of NFL experience to draw from, tight end Marcedes Lewis spoke with authority when he described the path the Bears needed to stay on this week to move past the gut-wrenching loss and toward a winning effort in Arizona.
“The great teams have resolve and they’re able to compartmentalize certain things,” Lewis said. “That last game didn’t end the way we wanted to. And from an offensive perspective we could have been a lot cleaner as far as the operation. But there’s really no time to lick your wounds. You just have to watch the film, learn from it and, as cliche as it sounds, go forward and keep rolling. And this season we have the leadership for that. So I’m honestly not worried about it.”
After maybe the toughest loss in his career, Byard has felt encouraged by the Bears’ player-led recovery efforts. “We still have a lot to play for,” he said. “And we feel, as players, that we’re a great team and we’re still going to be where we need to be at the end of this thing.”
So here we are, right?
As promised, Sunday has come fast. A surging Cardinals team is waiting at State Farm Stadium to test the Bears’ mental and emotional state. The stakes of the game are not to be ignored. Yet the Bears are confident they can summon the proper urgency.
Asked what he needed to see throughout this week — and most importantly Sunday afternoon in Arizona — to confirm the Bears were meeting their standards, Johnson was appropriately direct.
“(Bleep),” he said, “we’ve got to win. Because, I mean, we can do things Monday through Saturday and that all feels good going into the game and then we lose. And quite honestly, it don’t mean (bleep) to me. We’re here for wins and losses, not just doing things the right way. Hopefully doing things the right way gets us those wins. But ultimately, it’s about winning and losing.”
So onward the Bears move now, across that high wire and toward their desired destination. One foot in front of the other and with little room for wobble.
