Everything goes wrong for Bears in humbling 19-11 loss to Colts in Nick Foles’ starting debut

The offense is still stale and sloppy.

The defense is still suspect.

The Bears still aren’t good enough.

Everything that was true about them in their first three games was still the case in their 19-11 loss Sunday to the Colts, and swapping in Nick Foles for Mitch Trubisky as their starting quarterback didn’t change a thing about their broken offense as they suffered their first loss of the season.

Foles will get some patience simply because he’s new, but another game or two like this will reopen the quarterback debate. He completed 26 of 42 passes for 249 yards with a touchdown and an interception to arrive at a dismal 76.4 passer rating. That’s 11 points worse than where Trubisky left off.

‘‘It wasn’t the best game,’’ Foles said. ‘‘I didn’t execute well enough, and we didn’t execute well enough.

‘‘I have to be better. I have to be more crisp. It’s as simple as that. And I look forward to improving.’’

Foles was inaccurate and disheveled — the opposite of how he looked when he led a magnificent comeback against the Falcons a week earlier.

On one play, Foles faked a handoff to running back David Montgomery. The ball seemed stuck between them, then Foles threw it off the back of Montgomery’s leg as he ran out of the backfield.

On various deep shots, Foles’ passes adhered to social-distancing protocols by staying at least six feet away from his receivers.

Foles got one-third of his passing yards on a field-goal drive in the second quarter that began at the Bears’ 7-yard line. He went 5-for-6 for 82 yards for a 118.8 rating on that possession but scored a 67.7 otherwise.

The low point came with 11 minutes left as Foles tried to rally the Bears back into the game from a 16-3 deficit. He got them to the Colts’ 26-yard line before his throw over the middle hit receiver Anthony Miller’s hands and ricocheted to Colts safety Julian Blackmon for an interception.

Foles took the blame, saying he threw the ball ‘‘about six inches too far.’’ While it looked as though Miller could have made the play, there was little chemistry and cohesion in the passing attack overall.

‘‘This is not gonna happen overnight with Nick,’’ coach Matt Nagy said. ‘‘This is gonna take a little bit of time as he gets going.’’

Time is another thing the Bears don’t have. Tom Brady and the Buccaneers will be here Thursday night.

This was the Bears’ chance to prove they were on the right track. The Colts are a playoff team, but they’re far from overwhelming. If the Bears want to be a good team, they need to beat teams in this weight class at home. A victory would have set the stage beautifully for Thursday. Instead, they’ll stagger in as sizable underdogs.

With the benefit of the newly expanded 14-team playoff field, the Bears probably can go 6-6 from here and still reach the postseason. They looked exactly like that kind of middling team Sunday.

Really, they’ve been that all along; the Colts were the first opponent good enough to expose it.

And if their floundering offense isn’t problematic enough for the Bears, there has been a nagging feeling all season that their defense isn’t quite right.

Holding the Colts to 19 points is fine, but the Bears aren’t getting the game-changing takeaways they need. Their defense is good, but any hope for a meaningful season depends on it being great. This was the fourth time in the last two seasons the Bears held an opponent to fewer than 20 points and lost.

Their defense is supposed to be Trubisky-proof or, now, Foles-proof. It hasn’t been.

Their most devastating shortfall came near the end, when the Colts ran 7:12 off the clock after Foles’ interception. They ran 11 times for 43 yards on that possession, converting a fourth down and a third down on their way to a field goal and a 19-3 lead with 3:47 left.

‘‘That was a tough game to be a part of,’’ said Nagy, the architect of an offense that has scored fewer than 20 points in 11 of 20 games the last two seasons.

It was tough to watch, too. Another Bears game, another afternoon searching through the thesaurus for antonyms of fun: frustration, tedium, drudgery.

That last one fits just right for an offense that struggles as much to convert a third down — they were 4-for-14, which will maintain their No. 29 ranking in that category — as viewers do to stay awake. Anyone who made it through the game without drifting off at least once has a superhuman attention span.

And now the Bears step up in degree of difficulty as they take on the Bucs, fresh off Brady throwing five touchdown passes in a 38-31 victory against the Chargers.

The Bears can’t keep up with that firepower. And it’s hard to be certain they can contain it, either.