It doesn’t even matter what additions the Bears make.
No. 1 overall pick Caleb Williams. Coach Ben Johnson. A new contract for general manager Ryan Poles. A new pocket square for besuited president Kevin Warren.
Unfailingly, the Bears still manage to subtract from our Sundays. The misery of watching them play only multiplies.
Never more so than when they’re bumbling around in their division, an old routine they took to a new level Sunday in a pathetic 52-21 loss to the Lions in Detroit.
Does 0-2 equal season over? It sure feels like it does, and not merely because NFL teams that lose their first two games get to the playoffs about 12% of the time.
Somehow, the Bears have gotten even worse. When they went to Detroit in 2023 and blew a 26-14 lead with under four minutes to go — too conservative on offense for their own good — they were a subpar team. When they went to Detroit in 2024 and lost 23-20 in catastrophic fashion, running out of time with a timeout left in their pockets — the final straw that got coach Matt Eberflus fired the next day — they were an amateur-hour outfit. This time, they dragged tail out of Ford Field as maybe, just maybe, the worst team in the NFL.
Did you see that coming? No one did.
Is “worst” too strong? It might not be strong enough.
It’s not easy to give up 50-plus points in a game, or else the Bears would’ve done it sometime in between 2014 against the Packers and now. It’s not easy to give up seven touchdowns and 511 yards, yet here we are. It’s not easy to lose the turnover battle, the penalty battle, the fourth-down battle, the coaching battle and the every-other-kind-of-battle, but these are your Monsters of the Midway, folks. You didn’t ask for them, but you’ve got them.
“Any time you lose a game like that, man, it’s a kick in the teeth,” Johnson said. “Nothing about that feels good.”
Kicks in the teeth generally don’t. Head-to-toe beatdowns definitely don’t.
Lions fans booed Johnson, the team’s former offensive coordinator, when he walked onto the field before the game. Bears fans undoubtedly took over from there, a glaring reason occurring early in the second quarter when Johnson elected to go for it on fourth-and-1 from the Bears’ 37-yard line. For the second play in a row, a quarterback sneak went nowhere. In this age of the Eagles’ vaunted “Tush Push,” why Johnson would have Williams fall into a phalanx of giants without anyone pushing at his back is mystifying.
In something of a last gasp, the Bears’ defense held after that fourth-down failure. From there, though, the Lions went up and down the field at will. Their defense had its way as well. The Bears — ever the division doormats — were far out of their league.
“They fought,” Johnson said of his team. “They fought the entire game.”
Is extra credit given for that? Because it seems to be a basic part of the job. Besides, it would have been kinder to the rest of us had the Bears headed home early instead.
“We have a lot of prideful guys,” Johnson said. “We’re two games into the season.”
Unfortunately, that’s the problem. There are another 15 to go, whether we like it or not.
The next seven games are outside the NFC North, which absolutely can’t be a bad thing. The Bears might even visit the win column a couple of times before their visit to Minnesota on Nov. 16, when one can only assume the worst will resume.
It’s impossible to overstate how out of their depth the Bears have been inside the division. Since they went 4-2 in 2019, they’ve strung together records of 2-4, 2-4, 0-6, 0-6, 1-5 and, so far this season, 0-2. That comes to a grand total of 5-27, in case you were struggling with the heavy-duty math.
The Bears are 1-6 in their last seven games against the Lions, the only NFC team that hasn’t been to a Super Bowl. The Bears are 1-8 in their last nine games against the Vikings, who beat them in the opener. Last year’s win in Green Bay ended an 11-game losing streak to the Packers.
“We’ve got to play better, simple as that,” Johnson said.
Oh, it’s simple.
Playoffs? No chance. Contending in the division? No chance. We know those things already, just two games in.
Are they really going to build a new stadium for these Bears? A better idea would be to build an underground bunker and hide the Bears where we can’t find them.
