Once the Bears get through their season finale Sunday in Green Bay, they’ll follow a familiar routine: Head back to Halas Hall, clear out their lockers and watch the playoffs on television.
But despite the maddening mono-tony, hope is high.
General manager Ryan Poles has them in a good spot. It’s easy to lose sight of that while debating what the Bears should do in 2024 with coach Matt Eberflus and quarterback Justin Fields. Poles is choosing between something that works and something that might work better — and that’s tremendously fortuitous.
The Bears could do essentially nothing and probably be an odds-on favorite to make the playoffs as a wild card next year. If they kept Eberflus, preserved the seemingly ill-fitting combination of Fields and offensive coordinator Luke Getsy and used their draft picks and free-agency money for additions, they’d still be projected to be better than .500.
There’s minimal chance they’d actually be that complacent, but it’s a strong starting point for the offseason. That wasn’t the case when they were done with quarterback Mitch Trubisky after the 2019 season and coach Matt Nagy after 2021. They had no choice but to move on.
In Trubisky’s case, they tried but couldn’t. They had seen more than enough, but their resources were so depleted that all they could do was trade for Nick Foles.
Fields is far better than Trubisky. He has flaws, sure, but also a much brighter outlook. When the Bears let Trubisky walk after the 2020 season, no one worried it would come back to bite them. Whether it’s with the Bears or elsewhere, Fields could still have a good career.
The alternative to keeping him in Chicago is using the No. 1 draft pick to take USC quarterback Caleb Williams, thought to be a once-every-few-years talent. Poles isn’t being forced into anything. He’s choosing between a good option and potentially a great one.
Likewise, if Poles and team president and CEO Kevin Warren call Eberflus into a conference room and ask him to defend his work, it won’t be like in 2021, when Nagy had no answers by the end of the season. Eberflus will have some decent arguments. He could point to momentum. He could show examples of player development on his watch. He could say — and this was the most problematic part for Nagy — that he at least figured out his side of the ball, with the Bears emerging as an elite defense.
Could Poles and Warren find someone more impressive than Eberflus? That’s possible. Maybe they’d shift to an offensive-minded coach. But the Bears’ trajectory looks good right now, and Eberflus helped them redirect it.
His 10-23 record in two seasons is brutal, but it’s skewed by having gone 3-14 last year with a thin roster in the first phase of Poles’ rebuild. This season has been disappointing, but the Bears will finish 8-9 if they beat the Packers on Sunday. That’s quite a jump.
“We knew there was a long game to this,” Eberflus told the Sun-Times. “When you have that perspective at the start of it, it’s not like, ‘Hey, we’ve got to spend all this money and do all this stuff right now.’ When you have that perspective, you’re able to handle the adversities that come.”
He believes the structure and system he implemented in his first season were valuable, despite the losses. And now that a good portion of the roster is meant to be around long-term, players can convey the expectations to newcomers.
“Set the standards, hold people accountable, partner with the players and work together to improve this,” Eberflus said. “And as we improve talent, which we have . . . what you see is the product starting to improve.”
The uptick is discernible and promising. The only reason for Poles to change any part of it is to accelerate and aim higher. So while this season was another letdown and there are huge decisions on the horizon, the Bears’ future hasn’t been this bright in a long time.
