Sometimes, it’s good to win ugly. After all, what do you learn from steamrolling everyone and making things look easy all the time?
That’s the silver lining I’m trying to take from the Chicago Bears’ messy 27-24 walk-off win over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers on Sunday Night Football.
I, like many, scoffed at the idea that the then-3-5 Bucs would “humble” the Bears the way several analysts had suggested Tampa would. And for the first quarter or so of action, it looked like we’d be right.
Unfortunately, we
weren’t.
It was terrible football from there on out. Five turnovers (four interceptions, varying in their degrees of bad, and an unfortunate fumble by Luther Burden III while he was concussed). The Bucs willed their way back into the game and eventually tied it up.
The 2025 Bears played and won some rough games, but nothing quite that bad.
But a win is a win, especially on a short week, and sometimes complementary football requires you to pick up your guys when they’re struggling. The offense did it in Week 1 as the defense couldn’t stop a nosebleed, scoring 59 points. This time, it was the defense’s turn to work their magic. We even got a Jaylon Johnson pick-six, for crying out loud! And in the end, the offense did just enough—thanks to some busted coverages by the Bucs—to seal the deal with Cairo Santos’ 38-yard field goal.
The most important thing: the Bears will go into their bye week at a strong 7-2, with their opportunity to seize the division lead still intact when they return. Get healthy. Learn from the failures of this game. Get back on the horse in Week 11 against the New Orleans Saints.
Also…let’s not do this again.
In the same way as the Bears didn’t need to continually prove their mettle in the clutch the way they did last year, they certainly don’t need to demonstrate they can give the ball away five times and still win every week. That’s not going to cut it.
Get that out of your system, and get back to being locked in and executing at a high level. The 3-5 Saints might not look like much, but they fight.
People are already suggesting the Bucs gave the league the blueprint for how to deal with Chicago’s offense, that this won’t be the last time we see Williams and Ben Johnson struggle like this.
For their sake, the Bears need to make sure it is. Because there’s a reason the 2006 Bears are the only other team in NFL history to win a game that brutal: it simply isn’t a winning formula.
The good news is that, as easy as it would’ve been for them to lose, they made the choice not to mail it in. And that counts for something. Specifically, it’s another positive number in the win column.
