For Jason Lieser’s optimistic look at the Bears’ next 10 games, click here.
It’s easy to be optimistic about the Bears’ first seven games. It gets harder to do so when you look at their final 10.
For all their success this season — to be 5-2 after starting three different quarterbacks is nothing short of remarkable — the Bears have struggled where it matters most: against the rest of the NFC North. Both their losses have come to divisional opponents: the Vikings in Week 2 and the Packers in an embarrassing Week 5.
The Bears have four more divisional games to play, starting with a Thanksgiving game against the Lions at Ford Field. To take the NFC North for the second-straight season, they’ll probably need to run the table against the Packers, Vikings and Lions.
That’s a difficult hill to climb, one far tougher than anything they’ve accomplished to this point this season. But if the Bears have their eyes on the NFC championship — and they should, given the way they’ve played — they know they have to position themselves to play as many playoff games at home as possible.
The Bears proved last year what a tremendous impact both their home crowd and freezing temperatures — wind chill was 26 degrees in the first playoff game and 11 in the second — can have in January.
They can’t put themselves in the same position this year without winning the NFC North. And they can’t win the NFC North without winning head-to-head matchups. At the least, they can’t count on it happening again.
When the Bears won the NFC North last year, they did so with just a 2-4 record. That had happened only two other times in the modern history of the sport, provided you throw out the 1982 strike year. Since the AFL-NFL merger in 1970, just two other teams won their division despite going 2-4 within it: the 1971 49ers and the 2010 Chiefs.
Bears coach Ben Johnson has never beaten the Lions. That needs to change for the Bears to get where they want to go. A Christmas Day matchup against the Packers looms large, too — if the Packers, win they’ll hold the tie-breaker against their rivals. And then there are the Vikings, the team that leads the NFC North. At the start of the year, the Bears could look at their season finale in Minneapolis and dream of a scenario in which the Vikings, eliminated from the playoffs and perhaps chasing a better draft pick, simply rolled over. A lot would have to go wrong for the Vikings, who had the best defense in the NFL entering Sunday’s games, to freefall into irrelevance by Week 18.
The Bears’ schedule the rest of the season features two of the best three teams in the AFC: the Jaguars at home and the Bills on the road. The defending Super Bowl champion Seahawks await the Bears next week in Seattle, where they’ve lost just one game the past two seasons to teams not named the 49ers.
But nothing will be more important than what they do against the NFC North. After starting the season 0-2 against the division, they don’t have any further margin for error.