“It’s close to playoff time, Chicago. We can’t be soft now.
Before we talk wins, before we talk playoffs, this is about growth. This is about becoming something real.”
— from the song “The Ben Johnson Standards” by Malcolm Rockwell
They are who we thought they weren’t. (But secretly wishing one day they’d become.) The best team in the NFC North until proven otherwise. A top six team in the NFL until proven different. A team whose record reflects one of the great turnarounds of this 2025 NFL season. Until reality sets in.
Well, reality has finally, officially, inescapably arrived in the form of a game against the Packers that could be the true beginning of a new-era rivalry that might rival what these games used to mean. You know, the ones that have given the Packers a 108-96 (six ties) advantage over the course of their 104-year, 210-game, two-playoff-meeting rivalry.
But as much as that history has been spoken into existence this week, none of it matters anymore. Not in the context of what the Bears currently mean and what they’re trying to say in the messaging they’re trying to send. The whole “we them” right now carries minimal weight or substance if they don’t avenge last season’s final-game win against the Pack, authenticating that last season’s Bears win was not an anomaly, that they’re 50 Cent and GBP are Diddy, that it was — and this is — the new reckoning.
As “statement games” go, this is this season’s loudest one, especially because a nationwide ‘‘belief’’ seems to exist that the Bears “ain’t on that level” yet. They’re behind the Packers (even as the Bears maintain a better record, 9-3 to Green Bay’s 8-3-1) in many power rankings, from Bleacher Report to Pro Football Focus. Andrew Whitworth of ‘‘Thursday Night Football’’ said on Rich Eisen’s show this week that the Packers were a better team. Even Vegas has the Pack at 9-1 odds to win the Super Bowl. The Bears: 25-1.
More weird was a “make it make sense” graphic of ESPN Analytics giving the Packers a 68.3% chance of winning this game at home and a 62.1% chance of winning when they come to Soldier Field for the Dec. 20 follow-up. That insulting data analysis should remind the Bears — irrespective of how many, if any, games they lose the rest of the way this season — of how the world outside Chicago really feels about them.
Fuel. They always talk about it in sports —how teams use it and what the results often are when they do. More than just preparing for this being the first true meaningful game against the Pack since that December battle in which the 9-2 Bears faced (and lost to) the 8-3 Packers in Lambeau in 2001, the Bears need to carry all the dismissive comments and assessments of them for this game as testimony that, in Johnson’s words, they “haven’t done anything yet.”
Like the next time Johnson takes off his shirt, those ESPN pie graphs of the GBP-favored percentages should be tattooed across his torso. In living color. A reminder of when they all (notice how I said “they all,” not “us”) said he and this team, for lack of a better valuation or take, weren’t.
“To be quite frank with ya [both Carolinas accent in full effect], I kinda enjoyed beating Matt LaFleur twice a year.”
As much as that introduction-to-Chicago news-conference quote from Johnson has been on loop all week leading up to this game, lost in the forced media’s bulletin-board material is the fact that Johnson never at any point indicated that was his mission. Just his like. His like as a Lions OC, not his expectation as our HC.
Kyle Brandt on NFL Network split hairs in a way that has to be documented for the new-era start of this enmity: “I don’t know if the Bears are better than the Packers, but right now the Bears are more interesting than the Packers.”
(Insert shoulder-shrug emoji here.)
Interesting diplomacy. Dude should be Stephen A.’s running mate.
This game is more pivotal than the Lions’ “blue washing” of the Cowboys on Thursday night. No disrespect: This game is more pivotal than the one between the Packers and Lions a few weeks ago that began the stark separation of who this season were “them” in the North’s depth chart.
A win Sunday places Johnson into the Mike Vrabel conversation. A win Sunday puts Caleb Williams in an on-even-level broadcast and podcast conversation with Jordan Love. A win Sunday gets Nahshon Wright in that Micah Parsons most-important-defensive-player-in-the-NFC conversation. It puts Ryan Poles in the GMOY conversation. It validates last week’s win over the Eagles and removes all conversation of that game being a one-off for the Bears.
A Sunday win creates fear of the Bears that hasn’t been a part of any conversation in the NFL in decades.
It all depends on the volume of the statement the Bears decide to make in the most important long-term game of this season, knowing that two weeks from now, they’ll only have to get louder.