The Bears don’t have to worry about facing Micah Parsons until Dec. 7.
By then, they’ll know where they stand in the toughest division in football — one that was made even more daunting by the Thursday trade that sent the star edge rusher from the Cowboys to the rival Packers.
Actually, they’ll have a sense less than two weeks from now.
The Bears open their season against the NFC North rival Vikings on Monday night and then 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 year marks the first time since 2006 — the Bears’ Super Bowl season — that they open the season with consecutive games against divisional opponents. They played all three NFC North foes across the first three games of that season.
Last year, the Bears didn’t even start divisional play until Nov. 17. In the three years before that, the Bears played two divisional games by Week 6.
The Bears-Vikings game is one of eight intra-divisional Week 1 contests. The NFC North and NFC East are the only two divisions that boast two such games this week.
For the Bears, the first two games of the season 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 in a season since 2019.
There are reasons for hope, though. 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 debut two coordinators Sunday against the Packers. They have a combined one year of NFL coordinator experience — John Morton called offensive plays for the 5-11 Jets in 2017 — and will still be settling in when they face the Bears.
Parsons, though, will have to wait. The Bears play the Packers twice in December — in Week 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 were particularly interested in analyzing exactly how the Parsons trade made their rivals better — “Honestly, man, I’m worried about what we got going on here in Chicago,” the linebacker said — but there’s no question the impact the move made on the NFC North.
Last year, it was the best division ever — none in NFL history can best its .662 winning percentage. The NFC North’s 45 combined wins — made all the more impressive because the Bears only contributed five — was four more than the next closest division last year.
Now it adds Parsons.
“The characteristics of the teams that are in this division — 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.”
This week, though, it starts Week 1.