2025 Chicago Bears Season Preview: The Embers Never Fade

Tonight. [Photo: Oswaldo Rios on Pinterest]

George Washington was a phenomenal leader of men. He was a man of high morals and integrity, an eloquent speaker, a master motivator. He led by example and brought out the best in his men. 

What he was not was a brilliant tactician.

Sure, he had his moments. He was good at deception, planting false information and letting the redcoats fall into the trap. But on the battlefield, time and again, he was outmaneuvered, outflanked, just plain outsmarted. He’d get beat by the same tactics on multiple occasions. 

Some early defeats had things looking bad for the colonists. Morale was low during the winter of 1777-78 in Valley Forge. There were serious doubts the war could be won. After all, the British military was the strongest, most professional fighting force in the world. The colonial army was…not that. 

Enter Baron von Steuben.

Friedrich von Steuben arrived in Valley Forge in February 1778 and went to work training the colonial army. He taught them how to shoot, how to march, where to dig latrines – things that, quite frankly, Washington should’ve addressed previously. The results were huge. von Steuben would end up being promoted to the rank of Major General. 

This is sort of what I feel like the Lions were like. Now their von Steuben’s coaching the Bears and his arrival comes not a moment too soon. The results have already been noticeable: everything feels more organized, practices are more intense, there was a discernible shift in philosophy during the draft. The latter is particularly exciting, because it signals that Ben Johnson has serious influence on the front office, a great development Ryan Poles’s tenure as general manager has been…uh…not great. 

Tearing things down is easy. Building them back up is much harder. The Matt Eberflus hire was a massive whiff. Poles traded Khalil Mack because he knew that Mack would be well into his thirties by the time the team was even thinking about contending, but yet, four years later, I’d still rather have Mack than the guy they drafted with the pick. This is due, in equal parts, to the guy they drafted’s inability to stay healthy and frustratingly still present deficiency at edge rusher. Poles’s grand plan to address said deficiency: give big money to Dayo Odeyingbo, who is coming off his worst season since his rookie year and was never a star to begin with. Roquan Smith is one is the best linebackers in the league. Poles traded him for another second-round pick. This time, the guy they took at least looks like he’s going to be a capital-D Dude, but now they’re paying Tremaine Edmunds 80% off what Roquan wanted to be not as good and TJ Edwards just got a $10 million a year extension, despite having visibly lost a step last year. Yeah, Poles fleeced the Panthers, but really, those are our standards? Smarter than the Panthers? Let’s aim higher, shall we?

And so now, we come to the beginning of the season, and we hope for great things. We hope for improvement, for meaningful December football, for playoffs, for a fun season, something we haven’t seen since 2018. But I see the holes at important positions, and…I just don’t know, man. We want to believe, though. Jeff Hughes said it perfectly in this piece for SportsMockery:

Sports fandom should be honest, and it should be predicated on a belief that defies mockery. (Site name notwithstanding.) Belief is the point. Belief is what makes the first week of the NFL season feel like a holiday. Belief does not require naivety or blind loyalty. It does not mean obsessively defending everything an organization does or does not do. Belief merely requires a supension of cynicism and an emotional openness; to be thrilled, to be enthralled, to be moved in a way that only sports seems to achieve within us. When the team you root for rewards that belief, ecstasy. When the team doesn’t, despair. That’s sports. That’s sports fandom. But none of it is possible without some semblance of belief.

We’re guaranteed 17 gamedays a year and I spend most of the rest of the days looking forward to those gamedays. A season ends and I immediately begin looking to the next one. I watch college all-star games, then the combine, then it’s tape and mock drafts until the big weekend in April, then after that, it’s just a couple months until the e-mail comes about training camp tickets. It’s one of my favorite days of the year. The day where we can actually see football on the horizon. That it’s almost here. Finally. And all these things are so fun because they provide hope. And then we finally get to this point where everyone’s 0-0 and possibilities are still endless. 

That’s 6 games where I like the Bears, 5 where I don’t, and 6 toss-ups. A few of these are against teams who look to be truly dreadful, so even if things don’t go so well for the Bears this year, 6-11 feels like the floor. They won 5 last year with *gestures broadly at everything* going on and should’ve won a few more. If things do go well and Caleb makes a big leap and they get enough from the defense, then they steal one of the tougher games, most of the toss-ups go their way, and 12-5 is the result. I’ve been too optimistic with these predictions in the past and I don’t want to do that again because it just makes disappointing seasons feel even worse. But I believe in Caleb Williams and I believe in Ben Johnson. The Bengals went to a Super Bowl in Joe Burrow’s 2nd year with a defense worse than this Bears unit and an offensive line much worse than the one Chicago’s about to field. I’m not expecting a trip to Santa Clara other than the one in December to play the 49ers, but, well, I’ll let Jeff say it:

It is far-fetched, perhaps, to call them Super Bowl contenders at the beginning of September 2025, but it is not far-fetched in the slightest to suggest that they should be playing tournament football in early 2026. And every team in the tournament has a chance to play on that final Sunday in February.

2025 Chicago Bears: 9-8, 3rd place NFC North, NFC Wild Card round

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