For a little while, you may have been fooled into thinking the Bears’ new general manager and coach had pulled it off—and were accomplishing two diametrically opposite things at once.
On one hand, the Bears were carrying, over the course of 2022, more than $90 million in dead cap charges, money allotted against the limit toward players no longer on the team. On the other hand, they were winning. They beat the Niners in the opener. They started 2–1. They climbed off the mat after a three-game losing streak to beat the Patriots on a Monday night in Foxborough to get back to 3–4.
They were gutsy, tough and hanging in contention. Then, the bottom fell out.
In the euphoria of that win, a 33–14 rout of Bill Belichick’s crew, no one on the field, in the owner’s suite or crowded into a jubilant Bears locker room saw what was coming next. Loss. After loss. After loss. At first, it was a string of heartbreakers. Later in the season came the blowouts. And when it was over, and Ryan Poles and Matt Eberflus were left to process their first season in charge, the totality of the damage was a 10-game losing streak to end it.
“As a coach you have this philosophy that you build over time, being with the coaches that I was with all those years,” said Eberflus, leaning back in a chair in the lobby of Halas Hall on a Saturday in late July. “You come up with this, and after every game, you look at how we did. The results are the results: How can we improve and get better, individually, as a player, and as a football team? So you say that. It’s never really tested like it was last year.
“You lose one; then you go on a win streak of nine games. You might lose two in a row. That’s how it usually goes, and you have a good football team. Last year it was put to the test. I was saying those words every single time, but now it was being tested.”
The hope, first and foremost, for the Bears coach and GM, is that the worst is now behind them. And the guys captaining Chicago’s rebuild hope they’ll look back at it like someone might remember pledging a fraternity—the best time they never want to have again.
It’s not unrealistic, either, for them to see it that way. On the first Saturday of training camp, both Eberflus and Poles were able to cut through last year’s losses (the nail-biters vs. the Dolphins and Falcons, the routs at the hands of the Cowboys and Bills, and the defeats of both sorts against the Lions), and see a very real benefit for going through what they did, which wasn’t easy on anyone.
Poles, for his part, didn’t sugarcoat the experience. “Extremely hard,” he called it. “It was really, really difficult. It was emotionally draining.”
It was also, believe it or not, rewarding.
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That probably sounds strange, because rewards aren’t often cloaked in a 10-game losing streak. But they came in the form of the team’s effort, resilience and determination, all of which doubled as validation that, at the very least, the new guys were filling the building with the right kinds of people—a necessary precursor to getting the right kinds of players in the building.
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“It helps set our foundation,” says Poles. “If you came out here for a practice in Week 17—in fact, one of the beat writers said it to me—you would have no idea this team was a three-win team. If you can have that discipline and mental toughness to attack one week at a time, regardless of the ups and downs of the season, I think that pays off big-time when you actually start getting that mentality in the room and start winning games.”
That, of course, wouldn’t really help in the immediate aftermath of a game. But Poles—who lost fewer games in his last three years with the Chiefs than he did his first in Chicago—self-imposed the old 24-hour rule to control those emotions. In other words, he’d allow himself to grieve, then, he says, “You had to really open up your vision and see what you’re trying to accomplish, where you’re at as a team, see the benefit of playing a lot of young guys.”
Meanwhile, Eberflus tried to accentuate smaller victories as the losses mounted.
One of those wins was an improving ability to take the ball away on defense and protect it on offense. Another was how, as the season wore on, Chicago could run the ball and stop the run. These things, obviously, weren’t going to get the Bears into the playoffs. But winning in those areas, Eberflus believes, is a necessary step toward creating the larger wins, the ones that count in the standing, that the team couldn’t manage at the end of last year.
And staying connected enough for that stuff to happen was, as the coaches saw it, another win, one that happened in large part thanks to the leadership of guys like Justin Fields, Cody Whitehair, Justin Jones and Eddie Jackson.
“It was our relationship with the players that was so strong and so good that we could go through those guys. Then, we give it to them,” Eberflus said. “They were leading the team, which is the best part of it, leading from the inside out. We would just send that same message. We had a leadership council that I’d meet with once or twice a week. They would carry that message of stay in the process and stay right here, keep battling, championship work habits.
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“I always told them that all we have is what we have on the practice field. We’ve got the meeting time, and then we’ve got to go execute out there. They stayed true to that.”
The aforementioned four players are back, and leading again, with Fields in particular more comfortable and vocal in his leadership role. So are a few others that made up the core of the team. But as was the plan when Poles and Eberflus decided to hit the reset button back in the winter of 2022, eat the cap debt and turn over the roster, seemingly everything else has changed in the makeup of the team.
The offense has been almost completely rebuilt around Fields, and the defense has been reworked to fit the specifics that Eberflus looks for, position by position. Just 15 players that Poles and Eberflus inherited are left on the 90-man roster, and it’s fair to say the retooling is going to keep going.
That said, if the plan for the rebuild goes the way it was drawn up, what happened last year (even if it’s no one’s intention to lose 10 in a row) will be a part of the story. And, really, not even necessarily in a bad way.
“It was how the guys hung together,” said Eberflus. “The bond that we had was so strong, guys were still working, still locked in, still competing. That’s what I’m most proud of.”
It’s proof, to Eberflus, that his players, and coaches, passed the test—the one the coach referenced earlier on continuing to improve, and progress, regardless of the results—they were presented with a year ago.
Now we’ll see whether it sets the Bears up to ace the bigger ones ahead.
