Bears’ season collapses with 22-14 loss to Eagles

PHILADELPHIA — Think of everything this game was supposed to be for the Bears.

In August, when most of Chicago was living in the alternate reality of this team being a Super Bowl contender, the midseason game against the Eagles looked like just another stop on the worldwide victory tour. The Bears would avenge their playoff loss from last season and march along.

After the Bears’ recent regression, it was reframed as exactly the type of do-or-die moment that could spark them back to life. On the verge of total collapse, they might grit their teeth and save the season.

Instead, it was more misery.

The Bears made a late push, but it wasn’t enough to salvage an otherwise-bumbling afternoon. The Eagles dropped them 22-14, and it felt more lopsided than that.

‘‘It’s frustrating for all of us,’’ coach Matt Nagy said. ‘‘It’s not what we wanted or where we know we should be.’’

The Eagles (5-4) might use this game to launch a playoff run; the Bears (3-5) can forget it. They’ve lost four in a row and are already out of time to make anything meaningful out of this season. Shooting for 8-8 borders on overly ambitious.

Nagy was heartened by his players’ resolve, and the Bears scored two touchdowns in the second half to cut their deficit to 19-14. But they have been reduced to pointing out inconsequential highlights like a varsity team.

The Bears got the ball back with a chance to drive for the lead with 10 minutes left, but the Eagles shut them down. Then they schooled the Bears on how winning teams finish: They ran 8:14 off the clock on a 69-yard drive for a field goal.

It was more of that familiar feeling of an opponent continually outwitting and outmatching them.

The Eagles often made the Bears’ defense look ordinary and didn’t give their offense an inch — almost literally — in the first half. It reached a point where punting on third down would have been reasonable.

In a season in which the Bears repeatedly have hit what they thought was rock bottom, only to find more room to plummet, they played their worst first half of offense in the modern era.

‘‘Just really, really sloppy,’’ Nagy said. ‘‘Extremely sloppy. If you think you’re gonna do that coming into a place like this with a defense like they have, you’re not gonna be in good shape.’’

The Bears trudged to the locker room trailing 12-0 after gaining a net of nine yards on 20 plays. They went three-and-out five times on six possessions, and the deepest they advanced was their own 41.

They only broke into positive yardage on a frantic-but-fruitless possession in the final minute of the half that featured a six-yard pass from Mitch Trubisky to Tarik Cohen for their longest play to that point.

Trubisky was 6-for-13 for 24 yards and a passer rating of 53 at halftime. He finished with 10 completions, the NFL’s third-fewest this season by a quarterback with at least 20 passes.

Nagy never gave a thought to benching him. He stuck to his usual line of ‘‘it was us as a unit’’ rather than take a flame-thrower to Trubisky, who has posted a passer rating below 87 in all but one game this season.

Meanwhile, the defensive failures were abundant and assorted. The Eagles went on long field-goal drives the first two times they had the ball and struck for a touchdown on their third possession. They didn’t punt until 3:14 left in the second quarter and finished the half with 202 yards.

In the first half, ex-Bears running back Jordan Howard averaged 4.1 yards per carry, Carson Wentz had a passer rating of nearly 100 and the defense self-sabotaged itself with four neutral-zone infractions, a pass-interference call and a late hit that negated what would have been a fourth-and-one stop.

‘‘It’s a hard loss, man, coming into their home and knowing it was gonna take a lot from the defense to put us in position to win,’’ outside linebacker Khalil Mack said.

The defense must be near-perfect, and it hasn’t been for a while.

The implosion against the Eagles saddled the Bears with their fifth loss, exceeding their total from all of last season. Even the optimists must accept the season is shot with two months left.

‘‘We gotta play every game like it’s the playoffs,’’ safety Ha Ha Clinton-Dix said. ‘‘We’re in the playoffs now. If we want to go to the playoffs, we’re fitting to see what we’ve got right now.’’

The Bears will cling to that dream until mathematical elimination, but everyone else already has let it go.