If the Bears were looking for a reason to keep the core of their team intact by bringing back coach Matt Nagy, general manager Ryan Pace and quarterback Mitch Trubisky, they can probably talk themselves into this semi-competitive loss to the Packers being the justification.
They shouldn’t.
The Bears are on an endless road to nowhere, and hanging with the Packers into the fourth quarter before losing 35-16 is hardly a counterpoint to that assessment. They’re in the playoffs, though, because the Cardinals lost to the Rams. That barely qualifies as something to celebrate.
It all but assures Pace and Nagy of keeping their jobs despite how disheveled this team looked on paper (Pace) and on the field (Nagy) throughout the season. And if those two are back, bet on Trubisky joining them.
The Bears finished 8-8 for the second season in a row, and whether they made the playoffs is arbitrary. Stumbling into the postseason because of a lucky break in a game 2,000 miles away — and even then, only because the NFL added a seventh playoff spot in each conference this season — doesn’t somehow make this 8-8 more impressive than meandering to 8-8 last season.
The Bears’ prize for this in the short term, by the way, is one of the scariest propositions in the NFL: a playoff game in New Orleans.
It’ll be confusing inside Halas Hall to see someone ripping an 8-8 season, because that generally passes for acceptable. It’s the second-best record they’ve had in Pace’s seven seasons running the team. They’re now 42-54 under his watch and have scored the fourth-fewest points in the league during that span.
For every great draft pick like Eddie Jackson in the fourth round, there’s a wasted first- or second-rounder.
For every Darnell Mooney breakout, there’s an Anthony Miller sliding toward obscurity.
For every rising Roquan Smith, there’s a declining Danny Trevathan with two years left on his contract.
For every brilliant pickup like Cairo Santos, there’s a $70 million contract for Robert Quinn while Leonard Floyd puts up the best season of his career for the Rams.
For all the hope behind Trubisky’s supposed late-season resurgence, there’s the dead weight of Nick Foles being signed through 2022.
Every good thing about the Bears has something to offset it, which is exactly how a team lands at 8-8.
And now the Bears, because of a winning streak against some of the worst teams in the NFL and the Cardinals gifting them a playoff spot, will likely sign up for more of the same. Rather than do the hard work of a rebuild, they’ll hope a couple tweaks can vault them into being a contender.
After watching them rack up wins against a string of bad teams other than the Buccaneers and finishing five games behind the Packers in the NFC North, that’s delusional.
Making the playoffs is a nice accomplishment from the perspective that the Bears sat at 5-7 a month ago, but it’s not necessarily meaningful in the long term. Every organization’s standard should be competing for a championship or clearly headed toward it, and that’s a real stretch for this team.
It was a fun ride watching the Bears claw back into the playoff chase and nervously checking scores on the final day of the season to see if they made it, but the best teams fly above that drama at a much higher altitude. The Bears should aspire to more than this, and tinkering with a team that’s gone 16-16 over the last two seasons isn’t the way to get it.
