Is there any such thing as a bad win when you’re the Chicago Bears?
That’s like asking if there’s any such thing as a bad fourth-quarter, last-ditch, winning touchdown drive led by quarterback Caleb Williams.
In either case, the answer begins with an expletive — feel free to choose your own, most any will do — followed by a hearty “no.”
The list of negatives with this Bears team is long, and probably not going away any time soon. Still, after a 25-24 win against the less-than-the-sum-of-their-parts Raiders, the whole messy, nonsensical, intricately flawed display that was the Bears’ September somehow added up to a record of 2-2.
Nobody laughs at 2-2, do they?
As unlikely as it has seemed at times to this point, given all their bumbles and stumbles — even a “Stumblebum” trick play that went nowhere Sunday — the Bears head into a bye week as an actual non-disaster. So they’ve got that going for them.
“We’re building something special here,” coach Ben Johnson said.
Maybe they are. Maybe they aren’t.
The Bears forced back-to-back turnovers to begin the game — one a slick interception by safety Kevin Byard III, the next a delightful blowup of a fourth-down play by lineman Andrew Billings — and took possession after each inside the Raiders’ 25-yard line. But they came away with a total of three yards gained and a sorry, almost useless three points on the scoreboard.
Williams couldn’t do much of anything right in the first half, when the offense looked disconnected and dysfunctional on seemingly every play. Are the Bears a football team or an inflatable tube man outside an auto dealership? It’s hard to tell sometimes.
Bad things never stopped happening. The Bears tried a fake flea-flicker in the third quarter that turned into a nice gain, but running back D’Andre Swift was called for a facemask. A snafu on a fourth-quarter snap in the red zone cost them a chance at a touchdown. When tight end Cole Kmet wasn’t busy dropping passes, he was committing false starts.
The Bears couldn’t sack Geno Smith, who’d been dumped 12 times coming in. They couldn’t tackle running back Ashton Jeantty, who scored three touchdowns — one of them a 64-yard run that had “offensive rookie of the year” written all over it — or block defensive end Maxx Crosby, whom Williams called the best player he has played against. Johnson will see Jeanty and Crosby in his nightmares long after the thrill of surviving this trip to Las Vegas subsides.
“It’s easy to get frustrated, but we don’t panic,” he said. “We just don’t. It’s not who we are and that’s not what we do.”
In the end, they didn’t. Certainly not Williams, who looked nothing like a former No. 1 overall pick for most of the way. But he drove the Bears 69 yards in 11 plays over the five-plus minutes that mattered most. He threw to Swift, to DJ Moore, to Rome Odunze. He scrambled for key yards, outracing the terrifying Crosby to the sideline to set up the offense at the 6. Swift, despite having had a brutal go of it himself, ran it twice from there for the winning touchdown.
Once upon a time at the Cotton Bowl stadium in Dallas, Williams the college freshman got called into a game for Oklahoma, which trailed archrival Texas 35-17. He turned to a teammate and declared that his “legend” was about to begin. The Sooners won 55-48.
It wasn’t that dramatic at Allegiant Stadium, but Williams took the field before the final drive against the Raiders, looked at his teammates in the huddle and said, “This is the moment. This is where we go win the game.” Pretty good stuff.
Of course, that touchdown drive wouldn’t have won a damn thing if not for Josh Blackwell’s block of Daniel Carlson’s 54-yard field goal try with just over half a minute left on the game clock. Yes, the Bears took the lead and then nearly gave it back, which would have been their biggest bumble and most egregious stumble on a day filled with too many of them.
Riffling through his memory for famous Las Vegas acts, a dusty scribe might even have had an idea for a play on Penn & Teller. Had Johnson’s Bears fallen into last place at 1-3, “Ben & Cellar” would’ve worked quite nicely as a headline.
Alas, they sure ruined that. A win they didn’t deserve? Probably so, but there are no bad wins with this team. The Bears hit on 17 and somehow were dealt a 4. They rivered a gutshot straight. A roulette table has only 38 numbers, but the Bears’ whole stack ended up riding on No. 39 — Blackwell’s number, you know — and, by God, it hit.
“We’re going to fight, fall down seven times, get up eight, keep swinging,” Williams said.
Whatever works.
