A year ago Monday, the Lions were reeling.
They were 2-6 and in last place in the NFC North as they ran through the visitors’ tunnel at Soldier Field. They were allowing the most yards per game in the NFL and had just two weeks earlier fired their defensive coordinator.
“I still believe in the guys that we have,” coach Dan Campbell said at the time.
Campbell had won neither a road game nor two games in a row in his Lions career, going 5-19 in a year-and-a-half. Two NFL head coaches had been fired by the time the Lions traveled to Soldier Field last year; a third would have been reasonable, and a blowout loss to the Bears might have been the last straw. Through three quarters, that’s exactly what was happening — the Bears had the ball and a 14-point lead.
Then the rally started. After a Jack Sanborn interception was wiped out by a Jaylon Johnson penalty, the Lions scored to go down seven. Three plays later, quarterback Justin Fields threw an interception that college buddy Jeff Okudah returned 20 yards for a touchdown to tie the game. Three plays after that, Fields ran for a 67-yard touchdown — but Cairo Santos missed the extra point. The Lions scored with 2:24 to play to go up one and Fields eventually took a fourth-down sack to seal the loss.
The Lions never looked back.
They went 7-2 the rest of the season, starting with the Bears win, and barely missed a playoff berth. Their 7-2 record this year is tied with the Chiefs for the second-best in the NFL, trailing only the 8-1 Eagles.
The Bears are 3-15 since Nov. 13, 2022. The Lions are 14-4 — including a thrilling 41-38 win against the Chargers on Sunday that led Campbell to joke he’d melt into his seat on the flight home.
“Man, it’s a good win,” hes said. “We found a way.”
Now it’s the Bears’ head coach who’s reeling. Matt Eberflus is 6-21 in a year-and-a-half as coach. In the history of the charter franchise, John Fox is the only other Bears coach to have sole responsibility for six wins or fewer in a 27-game stretch.
Eberflus’ .222 career winning percentage is the worst in franchise history; Eberflus has to win four of his last seven to move past Abe Gibron for second-worse.
Campbell has proven that second-half turnarounds are possible. The problem for Eberflus, though, is that he doesn’t get to do what Campbell did last year — play the Bears twice in the second half of the season. Their Bears’ remaining strength of schedule has a .530 winning percentage, making it the 10th-toughest in the NFL.
Two of their seven remaining games are against the Lions — Sunday in Detroit and at Soldier Field two weeks later. Eberflus has never won a NFC North game.
There were years — decades, even — when the best thing you could say about the Bears were that they weren’t the Lions. Since the NFC North began in 2022, the Lions finished dead last nine times. The Bears had a worse record than the Lions only seven times.
Not anymore.
When the Bears gathered Monday, Eberflus buoyed his players by telling them they’d gone 3-3 in the last six games. In the Bears’ wins, he told them, they didn’t turn the ball over and collected five takeaways. He rattled off more stats — about the Bears’ good run game and stellar run defense, about their third-down defense.
When the Lions came to Soldier Field last year, they could rattle off stats, too — they had a top-10 offense.
The real numbers that mattered, then and now, are wins.
