The crow has been served, and I am about to eat it dutifully.
Every time someone asked before the season how I felt about the Chicago Bears’ prospects for 2025, I’ll charitably say I went with the “reverse
psychology” approach: “Wake me up once they get to seven wins.” In my mind, seven wins felt like a perfectly acceptable number for a Bears team with a first-year head coach, a developing young quarterback in his second offense in as many years, and a roster that wasn’t ready to contend for a title yet.
But more than anything, I just didn’t want to get too caught up in the hype, which is what happened last year when Williams walked into the “best situation a first-year quarterback has ever had.” So I told myself I wouldn’t get excited. Get to seven wins, and then we’ll talk.
And here we are: the Bears have seven wins, and it’s only Week 11.
On one hand, it’s still somewhat hard to get a great read on this team. Barely eking out wins against the likes of the Las Vegas Raiders, New York Giants, and Minnesota Vikings (after dropping their first contest against them) doesn’t feel like much cause for celebration.
But there’s no denying there’s something different about these Bears.
Sunday marked the fifth time this season—that’s right, five times—that they’ve stolen a victory from the jaws of defeat after doing the opposite for most of the six seasons before this. At some point, it’s not just luck. They truly believe they will win every single time they end up in one of these gotta-have-it situations. But more than that, we believe it, too. We might sit on pins and needles every week, wondering how they’ll do it, but that’s a testament to how our expectations have changed. We used to know in our bones the Bears would find a way to lose. Now, we’re becoming conditioned to think that, come hell or high water, they will find a way to win.
Moreover, they did it this time by bouncing back from critical mistakes: balancing out a bad punt coverage rep that set up a Vikings score with a crucial kick return that gave them a shot at the game-winning points; and Cairo Santos erasing an earlier fourth-quarter miss by punching a 48-yarder through the uprights at the buzzer.
It’s not just Caleb Williams’ heroics. It’s everyone, from rookies like Luther Burden III, Colston Loveland, and Kyle Monangai to old-timers like Santos.
This team does not blink in the face of adversity (which is good, because they see a lot of it). They knuckle up and fight. More than any play call or scheme Ben Johnson has brought to this team, that mentality has made all the difference.
Now look at them: atop the NFC North, controlling their own destiny with seven more weeks to play.
The end of this season will certainly test the Bears’ mettle, and we can’t expect them to squeak out six more wins like this. They’ll face adversity, and the league will begin to doubt them again at some point soon. But somehow, none of that matters right now. Because as of this moment, the Bears are in first place, and everything somehow feels possible. Because the Bears stopped caring about what everyone else thought of them and simply re-wrote everyone’s expectations—mine included.
You won’t catch me complaining.
