The Bears don’t have to worry about facing the Packers and star edge rusher Micah Parsons until Dec. 7.
By then they’ll know where they stand in the NFC North, the toughest division in the NFL and one that was made even more daunting by the trade Thursday that sent Parsons from the Cowboys to the Packers.
Actually, they’ll have a sense less than two weeks from now.
The Bears will open their season against the Vikings on Monday night, then will travel to face the Lions six days later. That makes a fast start even more essential than usual.
‘‘Winning the division gives you the best chance of getting in that dance at the end of the year,’’ linebacker Tremaine Edmunds said Monday. ‘‘Obviously, that’s a long ways away for us. . . . This is a divisional opponent starting in Week 1. There’s definitely a lot of stakes in it.’’
That’s usually not the case. This season marks the first time since 2006 that the Bears will open the season with consecutive games against division opponents. They played all three NFC North foes in the first three games of that season.
Last season, the Bears didn’t even start NFC North play until Nov. 17. In the three seasons before that, they played two division games by Week 6.
The Vikings-Bears game is one of eight intradivision matchups in Week 1. The NFC North and NFC East are the only two divisions that feature two such games.
For the Bears, the first two games are daunting. The Vikings and Lions combined to go 29-5 last season, making the Bears’ first two games the most difficult in the NFL. The Bears, meanwhile, haven’t won more than two NFC North games since 2019.
There are reasons for hope, however. Facing both teams early in the season might have its benefits, even for a team breaking in its own first-time head coach.
The Vikings will give quarterback J.J. McCarthy his first NFL start on ‘‘Monday Night Football.’’ That the La Grange Park native will be making his debut just miles from his hometown only adds to the spotlight — and the pressure.
The Lions will have new offensive and defensive coordinators Sunday against the Packers. They have a combined one season of NFL coordinator experience — John Morton called offensive plays for the 5-11 Jets in 2017 — and still will be settling in when they face the Bears.
Parsons, however, will have to wait. The Bears play the Packers twice in December — in Weeks 14 and 16.
‘‘I feel like we’re so one-week-at-a-time that that’s very much on the back burner,’’ center Drew Dalman said.
Neither Edmunds nor Dalman was particularly interested in analyzing exactly how the Parsons trade made the Packers better — ‘‘Honestly, man, I’m worried about what we’ve got going on here in Chicago,’’ Edmunds said — but there’s no question about the impact the move made on the NFC North.
It was the best division in NFL history last season, with its teams combining for a .662 winning percentage. The NFC North’s 45 combined victories — made more impressive because the Bears contributed only five — were four more than the next-closest division.
Now it has added Parsons.
‘‘The characteristics of the teams that are in this division [are] hard-nosed and a lot of grit, definitely highly competitive,’’ Edmunds said. ‘‘But that’s what you play this game for. You play this game to go against those types of teams. You play this game to be in those types of games. So I wouldn’t have it any other type of way, just as far as putting your best foot forward each and every week.’’
NOTE: Linebacker Carl Jones Jr., whom the Bears cut from the active roster Thursday, joined the practice squad. The Bears cut linebacker Power Echols to make room for him.