Some people are fans of the Chicago Bears. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Chicago Bears. This 2021 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here.
Your team: Chicago Bears.
Your 2020 record: 8-8. This team started 5-1 (how). They even beat the Bucs, who would go on to win the Super Bowl. After that came an inevitable parade of blithering idiocy that Bears fans—delusional as they are—have become long accustomed to. They got beaten single-handedly by a punter. One of their scrub-ass wideouts started whaling on a Saints player to defend the honor of his lucky mouthguard. They held the Titans to 228 total yards and still lost. They even had to score two garbage-time fourth-quarter TDs to make the final score of that loss look respectable. Their starting quarterback got benched and his replacement openly shat on the head coach to the Monday Night Football crew.
The Bears lost six in a row after that 5-1 start, cobbled together a three-game win streak against the most depressing teams in the league, backed into the playoffs after getting vaporized by Green Bay in Week 17, and then finished their season with a wild card loss in New Orleans that even the Saints don’t want to remember. A tidy encapsulation of what the Bears experience has been like under...
Your coach: Still Matt Nagy! With Ryan Pace still the GM! And Ted Phillips as the president! FOUR MORE YEARS! FOUR MORE YEARS!
“I was impressed with both of them this past season, especially during the six-game losing streak,” McCaskey said.
I’m fucking dead. That is primo Bears shit right there. You people thought your suffering was over when you finally got Jay Cutler out of town. Little did you know.
So here we go again, ready to fuck that chicken one more time. Every season it’s just Nagy standing there on the sidelines, alternating between having a nervous breakdown and a rage stroke, changing quarterbacks like they’re dead batteries, psyching out his own kicker, and calling knockoff Andy Reid bootlegs that have no shot of ever being successful. This man won Coach of the Year three years ago. Know who else won that honor once? Dick Jauron, coaching this team. It’s like winning a fucking voodoo doll.
Meanwhile, Ryan Pace committed the most fireable offense in football by trading up for Mitch Trubisky, currently fetching water for Josh Allen in Buffalo. And instead of firing Pace, the Bears just let him commit the same felony AGAIN. And they hired Tom Herman. I work for the wrong company.
Do they have a Guy on the coaching staff? Three of them. In addition to Mike Furrey and Deshea Townsend—remember those Guys?—the Bears coaching staff also includes Henry Burris, who will forever be part of the Moses Moreno Wing Of Terrifying Bears Emergency Starting Quarterbacks at Halas Hall.
Your quarterback: Now this is where it gets funny.
How can you NOT trust the Matt Nagy plan, I ask you? Andy Dalton, whose career is very much over, was brought in by the Bears from Dallas to gingerly warm the seat for first-round pick Justin Fields. Fields was drafted to be the successor to (one last chance for me to butcher his name Chicago-style) Mitch Turbinsky. You know that the Bears traded up to draft the future Nickelodeon Most Valuable Player over both Patrick Mahomes and Deshaun Watson. You know that the Bears lied to Mahomes about having him at the top of their draft board, and that Mahomes made them pay dearly for it. You know how badly Pace fucked this up, and perhaps you view the drafting of Fields as a necessary correction to that fuckup.
But can anyone feel good about the fact that the exact infrastructure that failed Trubisky is now in charge of Fields’s career? Pace gave up a first in next year’s draft—which will have a talent pool three to four times deeper than the 2021 draft, and that’s not an exaggeration—to leapfrog the Vikings and get Fields. I’m a Vikings fan, so all I know all about best laid plans backfiring. But I share a division with two other teams that are equally adept at fucking themselves with an opened umbrella. The Vikes, Bears, and Lions all cancel each other out. Fields looks good this preseason. It means NOTHING. They’ll ruin him. If you fear that Justin Fields will have the same career trajectory as Dwayne Haskins, there is absolutely no better team to make that a reality.
Russell Wilson wanted to play here (why) and they couldn’t pull it off.
What’s new that sucks: They’re leaving.
You gotta work REAL hard to have your shit ruined by Lori Lightfoot. Lori Lightfoot is a flat-brained penguin who spends every day busting her ass to earn the title of Worst Mayor In America. And she succeeded Rahm, mind you. Meanwhile the Bears are like DOY UH WE’RE GONNA MOVE TO ROCKLAND BECAUSE YOU DON’T LOVE US ENOUGH DOY UH … giving Lightfoot the first, and only, open dunk she’ll ever throw down in her worthless career. If this team can’t beat Lori Lightfoot, exactly what shot do they have against Green Bay?
On the field, the Bears lost half their offensive line and half their secondary because Robert Quinn’s insane contract left no room for them to keep anyone. They signed Damien Williams away from the Chiefs to platoon with David Montgomery, because in the 21st century, this team will NEVER give its best running back a consistent workload. They also traded up a second time in April to draft lineman Teven Jenkins, who may not even play this season after back surgery. Jenkins’s emergency replacement is Jason Peters, who’s older than the K-T boundary and who gives himself NEW health problems whenever he’s bored.
Gale Sayers died. Brian Urlacher’s younger, fatter brother was pardoned by Trump.
What has always sucked: This management doesn’t give half a shit about winning and hasn’t for a very long time. Your odds of seeing Illinois win the Big Ten are better than seeing the McCaskey family lift a mummified finger out of the cobwebs to make this team worth a shit. Why would you care about winning when no amount of winning will get the fat humps who root for this team to buy more merch than they do for the ’85 team?
The only reason the Bears don’t get lumped in routinely with the Browns and Lions of the league is because of that ’85 Bears team, and that team was a fucking fluke. That lone Super Bowl may as well be as distant as the Jets’ lone title, and yet here are Bears fans, all total slobs, filing into Soldier Field in McMahon jerseys going I HOPE THE SOFT PRETZELS TODAY AAAARE FRESH! and still laboring under the delusion that an overcast day means they’ll suddenly have the No. 1 defense in football.
Bears fans are like a relative you see once every three years whose house is always the same whenever you visit. Plastic sofa coverings. Weathered board games. A bookshelf of nothing but twice-read James Patterson paperbacks purchased at O’Hare. Dust covering a bowl of plastic fruit. Odd smells. Food that’s bad for you and somehow not even worth it. Chicago PD is cooler than any of these pieces of shit. Fuck them all. And fuck Big Cat with a kicking tee.
Akiem Hicks and Khalil Mack are your only good players and both of them will get hurt.
Ratto says: Is Andy Dalton an upgrade from Mitchell Trubisky? No. Why? Because it's the Bears quarterback job. In this ever-swirling vortex of filth, nothing is ever an upgrade from the lousy thing before it. Ryan Pace and Matt Nagy still have jobs, mostly because all four of their names have the same number of letters. BEST NAME TO HEAR ON TV: Arlington Hambright.
What might not suck: Fields will be just good enough to make me eat these words twice a year.
HEAR IT FROM BEARS FANS!
David:
I was recently hospitalized for severe anemia. A whole lot of my time in the hospital was spent staring straight ahead at walls because I was hooked up to machines that made it both uncomfortable to attempt sleeping and to try moving around in my hospital bed.
What I'm saying is that watching the Bears is a lot like this.
John:
We are the sweatiest, most backwards thinking set of dipshits in the NFL.
Tom:
We will wait too long to start Justin Fields and get like six great games out of him before he tears one ACL and has the other shot out by the CPD in a Portillo's drive thru.
Matt:
It's all sunshine and roses with Fields right now, but just wait until his first bad game when Bob from Beverly remembers that he's an intractable racist.
Jordan:
As much as I want to look down on Washington and Carolina fans for their respective treatments of RG3 and Cam Newton the instant their production started slipping, I know deep down that my fellow Bears fans are going to break out the tiki torches as soon as Justin Fields’ first incompletion is halfway in the air.
Jacob:
I'm excited for Justin Fields. I was also excited for Rex Grossman. I am not a good judge of quarterback talent, and neither are the Chicago Bears.
Jim:
Andy Dalton is a trash signing by a GM who clearly can't evaluate QBs at all and yet if Dalton had played his entire career for the Bears, he'd be the best QB in franchise history.
Wes:
Mike Dikta and Brian Urlacher can both get fucked and jump on a rusty pole.
Sean:
I've been to Chicago four times and every time I've been there, I witnessed a fight between Chicago girls. So I'm sure Kalyn Kahler is a great person but I'm also convinced that she'll throw down if the mood is right. Just don't get on her bad side.
[KALYN RESPONDS: “This is not wrong. I once caught a bitch stealing my wallet and I called her out on the street and reached into her bag.”]
Alex:
My dad, who doesn’t really care about sports, was a Kansas City Chiefs fan. The reason is his Dad was one, but my grandfather was a giant piece of shit who just one day got up and left my dad and his five siblings. So the only reason Dad got into the Chiefs was to try and re-connect with him after they hadn’t been in contact for 20 or so years. There are pictures somewhere of me and my two little brothers decked out in Chiefs gear. So I could have pretty easily been a Chiefs fan.
My grandfather eventually drank himself to death shortly after I met him for the first time in about 2000 when I was 10 years old. After that, Dad stopping caring about the Chiefs. He just couldn’t bring himself to care anymore. This also happened to be around the time I started getting into football, and my dad, who is a really good man, didn’t want to push any of this on me because it just reminded him of my awful grandfather, so he let me pick a team. We lived in Illinois, and I was already a Bulls and Cubs fan, so it made sense in my young head to be a Bears fan too.
Now let’s fast forward about 20 years. The Bears had a chance to draft a generational quarterback, but instead he went to the team that represents some legit family trauma. If my grandpa doesn’t die when he does, there is a pretty good chance that I’m a Chiefs fan, enjoying a fun, otherworldly quarterback, and at least one Super Bowl. My Dad and I decided this was one last fuck you from my prick grandfather to him and my family.
Fuck my dead piece of shit grandfather, but fuck Ryan Pace even more.
Luke:
Fuck Aaron Rodgers for thinking the sky isn’t blue enough.
Aaron:
Our coach had his brain broken by a missed field goal and now would rather stick his cock in a wood chipper than use a kicker.
John:
They recently bought property to move to Arlington Heights, which is up there for the worst suburb in America. At least 3/4s of our fanbase is ecstatic about this, for if this happens they will never have to think about interacting with a person of color ever again.
Matt:
The owners are a set of geriatric fail children who are also poster children for a 100% inheritance tax. The fans live under the delusion that this team is still (or ever really was) a giant of the league, despite one Super Bowl victory that's old enough to have heart problems and a bad back.
Oh and fuck Brian Urlacher. Go get another barbed wire tattoo with a hepatitis infected needle, you Trump humping dipshit. You're not fooling anyone with those hair plugs.
Leo:
The last time I went to a Bears game, they managed to lose to rookie Carson Wentz despite returning a punt for a touchdown, I almost got in a fight because people around me were super angry I didn't stand up for the anthem (this was peak Kaepernick time) and the guy next to me was texting about "damn disrespectful N****s." I don't go to Bears games anymore.
Charlie:
If we had Patrick Mahomes (which we could have) throwing to Michael Thomas, D'Andre Hopkins, Julio Jones and George Kittle, the bulk of the fan base would be screaming about how we need to run the ball at least 45 times because "dat's Chicago Bear football!"
Tim:
We're supposed to be a nicer, cleaner, cheaper NYC. But our traffic is almost as bad, our mayor is loathed by everyone, including her own voters, and the cost of living is starting to reach East Coast levels. We get three great weeks of weather between balls cold and ball-soup humid. Chicago is somehow both the greatest city in America and the most annoying.
Our best offseason move would have been Aaron Rodgers not returning to Green Bay.
Ryan:
The day after the Bears drafted Justin Fields, my 19-year-old son went online and ordered a Fields jersey. He thinks Fields is the next big thing. I don't have the heart to tell him how this ends. How it's always ended in Chicago. The boat always hits the iceberg. Ol' Yeller always gets shot. Bambi's mom always dies. And every QB in Chicago turns into a compost pile.
Kevin:
I've seen more ironic Andy Dalton jerseys around town than Justin Fields jerseys because we all know Andy is going to start more games than the most buzzed about athlete in town since pre-knee explosion Derrick Rose.
Jimmy:
Every year I read this series, and every year I laugh at every joke thrown every other team’s way. Yet without fail, every time the Bears article comes up, I take every single line as a personal insult and get all fussy because I, for some awful reason, personally identify with this stupid ass team that absolutely does not deserve the time, money, or affection of anyone.
I am garbage and I'm not even the worst Bears fan I know.
Zane:
Pace had an off-season that can be charitably described as "pants shittingly bad."
Christian:
Kyle Fuller got cut so this team could have two backup QBs.
Mike:
Ryan Pace should be the fourth best salesman at a Dallas-area Mazda dealership, but instead he's had one of the best jobs in sports for seven years. During his tenure we've had one season above .500 and have won zero playoff games, yet his job appears to be as secure as ever.Justin Fields will be instantly ruined by our laser-brained coach's vaporware offense, and they'll scapegoat him for not being able to "run the full playbook".In the Aaron Rodgers era this team is 5-22 versus the Packers, yet Bears fans everywhere pretend it's some kind of rivalry.I genuinely hate this team with every fiber of my being.
Harsha:
I was studying for my law school Bankruptcy final exam when Mitch Trubisky fumbled at the Bears' nine-yard line against the Lions with the Bears up by three points, and I felt a deep sense of the kind of longing for something I can't have that probably goes with some pithy German or Japanese phrase. I want to make some comparison between how I did on the test and the Bears, but it wouldn't matter: a lobotomized parakeet could restructure a corporation better than this team can play offense.
Jack:
The entertainment/shopping district outside the new Bears stadium in Arlington Heights is going to be the worst place on Earth. A corporate, soulless nightmare like Rosemont and Navy Pier, covered in a fresh set of Wrigleyville style piss, with a little suburban racism sprinkled in. Can't wait to argue with my drunk, Ditka-stached uncle about whether we're eating at Toby Keith's The Election was Rigged Bar & Grill or Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. after the game.
Chris:
The Bears are threatening to move to the ass town I was born and raised in. If that happens I'll become a Lions fan out of spite.
Spenser:
Jay Cutler is still one of my all-time favorite players. I watched every episode of Very Cavallari because of him. She broke his heart. He is a national treasure.
Tyler:
Our glamour position is linebacker.
Jeff:
We somehow made the playoffs with a classic Bears 8-8 record, and honestly the only part of the season I remember was our wide receiver sucker punching that Saints player.
Asa:
The team is owned by an ancient hag of a woman whose handlers never let speak in public due to fears of her dropping a hard R.
Fancy Boy Brandon:
The Bears have pinned all of their hopes on a guy who came from a college that has produced as many star quarterbacks as Stryper has produced hit songs over the past three decades.
Their owner exists exclusively to make Jerry Jones seem youthful, and her dunce children have all the charisma and talent of a wind sock on a lazy summer day.
The team is moving to Arlington Heights so they can tap into an even wider range of obese Midwesterners dying for the opportunity to be run over by one of Mike Ditka's drunk kids.
Rich:
Because they printed out thousands of these stupid calendars and this is the first thing I see??? Fields better be the starter by game 3 or else Pace can just get hit by a horse at Arlington race track. Or what’s left of it.
Nicholas:
The best moment of my Bears fandom occurred when I wasn't even watching them. As Devin Hester ran the opening kickoff back in SB XLI, I was outside my best friend's front door, having arrived late to the party.
I experienced the double-doink game following the game through gamecast updates while waiting to board a flight in the Sydney airport. I left the terminal (and internet connection) with the Bears up with the football with 75 seconds remaining, and landed in Cairns to the news that we somehow lost to the Eagles, wasting Trubisky's only good season.
I have already bought a Justin Fields shirsey, knowing full well that all of his promise will vanish as soon as he puts on a Bears jersey, he will transform into Caleb Hanie.
Andy Dalton, a quarterback I've spent my entire adult life deriding, is now someone that I have to put my support behind. It should be viewed as a success if he doesn't get vaporized by Aaron Donald on national television Week 1.
David:
Now that Trubisky was a bust and Mack is the wrong side of 30... nothing has happened.
I'm a Bears fan living in Wisconsin, and I have an 18-month-old son. The clothes we get for him secondhand from garage sales nearly always include Packers gear, and frankly I feel a sense of peace wash over me when he wears them.
Dix Huge:
All my friends hate me because when they were celebrating Justin Fields, I pointed out that OSU and the Chicago Bears, combined, have NOT EVEN ONCE produced a viable, better-than-average professional quarterback.
Aaron Rodgers pulled his fake off-season drama queen bullshit just so he could stick his dick and balls into the Bears’ punch bowl one last time
Peter:
Listening to 670 after a Bears loss has now become a calendar event in my phone the day after each game.
Chris:
The extent of Matt Nagy's creative genius thus far are jet sweeps and calling up 50+ different pass plays with a quarterback who quite literally can't throw to the entire left side of the field.
Timothy:
We passed on Mahomes to trade up for Mitchell Trubisky. By executive order from Biden, Ryan Pace should have this tattooed on his forehead. Paint it on our endzone grass, stick a commemorative patch on our jerseys. Given the singular importance of the QB position and Mahomes’ potential to be the best ever, there will never be a worse draft move in any sport. The Chicago Bears should be synonymous with this failure forever as the culmination of our long and storied list of garbage quarterbacking. Start every blooper reel forever with Goodell announcing this pick. Justin Fields will end up being the greatest Bears QB in our history, and if things go well he might even be above average.
Adam:
They’re going to give up a 100+ year history of playing in this city to move to a glorified casino with a football field attached.
You just know deep down inside they’re gonna fuck the Fields situation all the way up.
Trevor:
My dad is usually a pretty intelligent guy. But whenever he begins to (justifiably) bemoan the Bears' QB situation, without fail he will start talking about how great Jim McMahon was, a rant that always ends with him making the insane argument that McMahon was "Tom Brady-esque" (a claim that gets increasingly absurd every year) and would've been considered a great QB if not for his many injuries. I pray to the football gods every night that Justin Fields turns out to be the real deal, if only so that my dad will finally shut the fuck up about Jim McMahon.
Steve:
This is a team that thought it was a good idea to send 97-year-old owner Virginia McCaskey to the epicenter of a Covid-19 outbreak last November to watch the Bears get blown out by the Packers. GM Ryan Pace is 42-54 with zero playoff wins and he whiffed on one first round QB trade-up already, so the natural reaction was to keep him so he could trade away more future assets to pick another QB . Pace has traded up in six of seven drafts. He has given away an entire draft’s worth of picks, even if you don’t count the trade for Khalil Mack, whose prime has been squandered. The next player he’s traded up for who earns a second contract with the Bears will be the first.
And then there are the fans: the ones who still think Jim McMahon was a better QB than Jay Cutler, and the ones who want to win games 10-6 behind a RB carrying the ball 40 times and the kind of defense that literally cannot exist under current NFL rules, and the ones who would be fine going 2-15 as long as those two wins are against the Packers.
I’ll end with this: my father died from a ruptured brain aneurysm the day the Bears hired Marc Trestman in 2013, and while rationally I know there’s no connection, part of me still thinks that his Bears fan brain somehow knew what was to come and just couldn’t hold on any longer.
Robert:
Fuck the Bears with Tony La Russa's open container.
Sean:
Also fuck Ted Phillips with a whole jackfruit.
Mike:
Also, fuck Cody Parkey with a barb-wire wrapped paper-towel tube. I knew he wasn’t making that kick and I was 3/4 of a bottle of Bulleit Bourbon in at that point.
Submissions for the Defector NFL previews are closed. Next up: Indianapolis Colts.
