The Bears’ emergence last season couldn’t have been better timed.
It’s true they made gains of their own, primarily by hiring the consensus best coach available in Ben Johnson, but they also caught the rest of the NFC North in a lull. It gave them a chance to reset their rivalries and reestablish themselves in the division.
Being a power player in the North is the first step toward contending for a championship, and the Bears had mostly been a pushover. In the 11 seasons before Johnson’s arrival, they finished third or fourth in the division nine times and had the NFL’s second-worst divisional record at 20-46.
The landscape changed quickly, however.
The Packers, who had beaten the Bears a staggering 11 times in a row from 2019 to ’24, no longer are the intimidating nemesis they were when Aaron Rodgers was there. The Vikings whiffed on the No. 10 overall pick by taking quarterback J.J. McCarthy. And the Bears hit the Lions hard by prying Johnson, who had turned them into an elite offense as they chased a Super Bowl appearance.
Will those teams stay down? Will the Bears become the new bully? It’s a pivotal season in the North across the board.
Packers: Shaky ground
The Packers have a quarterback who stands in the top third of the NFL in most key stats and a coach who has the third-highest career winning percentage among active peers.
But it sure doesn’t feel that way. Nothing that Jordan Love or Matt LaFleur does seems to be quite good enough for the fanbase, and the pressure surged when the team fell apart after Micah Parsons tore his ACL late in the season. The Packers closed with five straight losses, including two fourth-quarter collapses against the Bears.
Parsons, by the way, is uncertain whether he’ll be back when the teams first meet in Week 5.
The Packers locked into Love and LaFleur regardless. Love’s contract carries him through 2028, and they surprisingly gave LaFleur a multi-year extension in January. If Caleb Williams and Johnson outdo that pairing, the Bears could control the rivalry for years.
That’s hardly a given, of course. Williams has yet to touch some of Love’s career-highs in a season, and LaFleur has matched or exceeded the 11-6 season Johnson just had four times. The Packers also had the No. 5 defense last season, while the Bears finished 29th.
The upside is the Bears’ outlook no longer is clouded by the Packers towering over them. Lambeau Field doesn’t scare Williams, who won there as a rookie and is 3-2 against the Packers in his career. And, as if he needed it, Johnson has a little extra motivation in his icy, tense rivalry with LaFleur.
Lions: Was that it?
Here’s where expectations stand in Detroit: The Lions went 9-8 last season, just their ninth winning season of this millennium, and coach Dan Campbell gave himself “a freaking F” for his job performance.
The plunge in the Lions’ trajectory — 9-8 in 2022, 12-5 in ’23, 15-2 in ’24 — means he has to prove all over again that he’s more than mere bluster. There were skeptics when the team hired him, and they’ve returned.
The new question is whether Johnson was the secret to his success. Campbell replaced Johnson with John Morton, who lost play-calling duties in November and his job at the end of the season.
Still, offense wasn’t the Lions’ biggest problem, so perhaps Campbell is capable of moving forward without Johnson. Quarterback Jared Goff had another superb season, and the team was fifth in yardage and points. The widely applauded hiring of new offensive coordinator Drew Petzing — “He’s going to knock it out of the park,” Johnson said — gives them good cause for optimism in that department.
It’s a bigger concern that the Lions allowed the 11th-most points last season, one spot worse than the Bears, and that’s where Campbell needs to show he’s truly the CEO-style coach he has been touted to be.
Vikings: Prove it (again), O’Connell
Bears fans don’t need a refresher on how devastating it is to a team to burn a high draft pick on the wrong quarterback after the recent travails of Justin Fields and Mitch Trubisky.
The Vikings are trying to clean up a similar mess after drafting McCarthy and letting eventual Super Bowl winner Sam Darnold walk in free agency to clear the way for him. McCarthy is the only 2024 first-round pick who has thrown more interceptions than touchdowns and was a disaster last season with a 72.6 passer rating. Neither Fields nor Trubisky ever posted a season rating that low for the Bears.
That disarray, in part, led to the chaotic firing of general manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah. It took the Vikings until June to hire his replacement, Nolan Teasley, so it’s more than merely the quarterback situation that must be sorted out.
Anyway, the new plan there is for coach Kevin O’Connell, a renowned quarterback wizard, to straighten out the wayward career of two-time Pro Bowl pick Kyler Murray.
O’Connell has made it work with far less talented players than Murray. Two teams already had written off Darnold as a bust before O’Connell coached him to a Pro Bowl season in 2024, for example. Incredibly, O’Connell has gone 43-25 and never been worse than 7-10 while relying on players like Darnold, McCarthy, Carson Wentz, Josh Dobbs and late-career Kirk Cousins.
If he can bring out the best of Murray, too, look out. The Vikings have one of the best defensive play-callers in the league in Brian Flores and had the No. 3 defense last season. They’ll also protect Murray better than the Cardinals’ atrocious offensive line did, and they’re supplying him with top wide receivers Justin Jefferson and Jordan Addison.
Own the throne
The Bears aren’t necessarily holding stronger cards than anyone else. They think they are, but there’s much to be determined with Williams still a work in progress, a defense full of question marks and after an offseason in, on paper, they lost more talent than they acquired.
The point of laying out concerns among the rest of the division teams isn’t to say that the Bears own the North after winning it last season. It’s that control of it for the near future is there for the taking — by anyone.
The Bears are on relatively equal footing, which is progress itself. The next step is to give everyone else a taste of what they endured for so many years. The goal shouldn’t be merely to win the NFC North, but to rule it.
As a starting point, it helps to have the best coach and quarterback. If Johnson and Williams definitively establish themselves as such, that would upend the recent hierarchy and put pressure on everyone else to measure up.