The Chicago Bears are coming into this season with a lot of new toys and plenty of reasons to believe that this season’s team will be vastly improved over the last.
Blue chip quarterback Caleb Williams is a Bear now, drafted with the team’s overall no. 1 spot in April’s NFL draft. Williams is thought to be an elite-level prospect with the ability to become a legend in the league.
The Bears also drafted highly-regarded wide receiver Rome Odunze with their other first-round draft pick (no. 9 overall).
Aside from the first-round duo of Williams and Odunze, the team also acquired veteran wide receiver Keenan Allen via trade with the Los Angeles Charges and running back D’Andre Swift via free agency, among others. Actually, the entire offense has been rebuilt, with new offensive coordinator Shane Waldron now overseeing everything.
Yeah, there’s reason for optimism this year.
But with the new pieces added and the rightful optimism that accompanies a franchise doing the right things to turn its fortunes around, there comes a bit of delusion, too.
Reason for Pessimism
Experts in the field can’t stop screaming at the Bears (and their fans) to hold their horses and to be realistic about what the team might actually do in 2024-2025.
The first gut punch to Chicago’s optimism came back in late March, a full month before the draft.
DraftKings Sportsbook predicted that the Bears, who finished with a 7-10 record last season, were going to register just 8.5 wins this upcoming season– a meager improvement over last year.
Now, ESPN analytics has delivered the exact same bad news to the Bears faithful, predicting the exact same 8.5 win total for the year and declaring that the team has just a 42% chance of making the playoffs.
Former NFL player and front office executive Louis Riddick feels that ESPN’s numbers are realistic, but that this Bears team has the ability to achieve more than the analytics lay out.
“This is a team that can make drastic, drastic improvements,” Riddick commented on NFL Live. “Could this be a team that rises up and surprises people? Yeah, it could, because person for person, when you’re looking at it on a piece of paper or on a computer screen, they have weapons that can match up with anybody, specifically offensively, and they have an offensive line that is very underrated.”
Riddick feels that a lot this season hinges on the working relationship between Waldron and Williams, as well as Williams’ league readiness.
“Can Shane allow Caleb to control things on the football field to the degree where Caleb is able to consistently make good decisions, not turn the football over, not put the football in harm’s way and not turn every play into the ad-lib play, which he knows he’s spectacular at and he knows that he can’t get away with in the NFL?”
Riddick’s positive and diplomatic take on things is not shared by everyone, though.
The NFC North is Too Good
Bleacher Report’s David Kenyon, for example, named the Bears one of the NFL’s most overrated teams coming into the 2024 season. He cited the talented and much improved NFC North as a major impediment to the Bears success in the first year of the Caleb Williams era.
“[General Manager] Ryan Poles has executed a smart plan since taking over as the Chicago Bears’ general manager. He cleared out the cap sheet, then reshaped the franchise’s future in a 2023 trade with the Carolina Panthers.
Still, it feels like the hype is coming one year early.
…The problem is Chicago must navigate a division with the Detroit Lions and Green Bay Packers. Taking on the NFC West likely won’t help the Bears in wild-card tiebreakers, and last year’s defensive surge coincided with playing four of the NFL’s worst offenses.
Chicago is trending the right direction, but bracing for a fourth straight year outside of the postseason would be wise.”
Brutal Assessment of Chicago Bears’ Chance
Joy Taylor of Speak on Fox Sports One shared Kenyon’s pessimistic take, but was downright brutal in her personal assessment.
“So which team in the NFC is going to fall off so much that it’s going to provide an opportunity for Caleb Williams to come in and win four more games as a rookie in a very tough division?” Taylor asked, rhetorically.
“Did all of these other teams walk off the face of the planet? Do they exist?”
“What we think of this division is not real, it is a very tough division.
“The Packers beat the Cowboys down on the road in the playoffs, the Lions went to the NFC championship game,” she added. “These teams have momentum, they have experience, they have postseason wins. They have quarterbacks they have returning. They got better. They’re in their (the Bears’) division.
“So it’s not about what I think Caleb Williams is capable of doing. It’s about the fact that I just can’t seem to forget that other teams are actually good and that they are in the division and that they recently accomplished great things.
Taylor would go on to throw cold water on Bears fans’ hope and optimism by pointing out that Williams is walking into a team that, realistically, is still only good on paper.
“And I just can’t dismiss what everyone else has been building to accommodate for one player that’s going to a team that has no culture, that has no history of winning as of late, whose coach we do not know is a good head coach, to all of these new additions — new additions by the way are all on paper, have not all played together,” she added.
So, Chicago fans would be well-advised to maybe not brag too loudly about their improved team and to be realistic with their expectations. A Bears team that plays well, shows promise and, maybe, just barely misses the playoffs might be closer to what’s going to happen than a shocking late-into-the-playoffs run.
