Back when NFL scoreboards couldn’t be relied upon to keep time, officials kept a starter’s pistol on the sideline. As the clock wound down to zero, an official — starting in 1965, it was line judge — would fire the gun in the air to signify the end of a quarter.
The NFL scrapped the practice at the end of the 1993 season, but the colloquialism — to play until the final gun — lived on. While it’s fair to wonder whether a tanking Bears team did that in a 29-13 loss Sunday to the Vikings, there’s no question the men running the first 14-loss team in franchise history need to take the concept of the starter’s pistol literally.
When the final gun sounded, general manager Ryan Poles and head coach Matt Eberflus ran out of excuses. So did quarterback Justin Fields, who should benefit from having more skilled teammates next season. They need to begin running — sprinting — in a race to build a winning team.
The Bears will have the most money in the NFL to spend and, thanks to a late touchdown pass and two-point conversion Sunday by the Texans, the No. 1 overall pick in the NFL Draft next spring. They also will have a roster that, by design, has more holes than almost any other team in football.
For the first time, Poles and Eberflus will have expectations to build the Bears into a winner.
Eberflus has spent the season saying his expectations are the same every week.
‘‘The standard is the standard,’’ he has said dozens of times.
Now the standard is changing, even if Eberflus won’t acknowledge it.
‘‘To me, that’s outside the locker room,’’ he pushed back Sunday. ‘‘We can’t control those things, and, again, we’re focused on our standard, how we operate in practice, in the meetings and in the game.’’
The Bears’ failures no longer can be met by the cheers of a sliver of the fan base that rooted against them every week with hopes they would improve their draft status. They no longer can claim that close losses mean anything. They no longer can be judged against the low expectations they set with their own roster construction.
No one in the Bears’ locker room celebrated a three-victory season, No. 1 draft pick or not. Running back David Montgomery was asked how to define it.
‘‘Unfortunate,’’ he said. ‘‘Just unfortunate. It’s just unfortunate.’’
What Poles accomplished in his first season required all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. He traded the Bears’ three best defensive players (Roquan Smith, Khalil Mack and Robert Quinn) and paid dearly, paying a league-high $93.3 million in dead cap charges. The NFL average was almost one-third as much.
The one win-now move Poles made — trading his own second-round pick to the Steelers for receiver Chase Claypool — has thus far been a dud. Only one of the one-year free-agent contracts he handed out last offseason led to a contract extension, and that was a one-year deal for receiver Equanimeous St. Brown. Cornerback Kyler Gordon and safety Jaquan Brisker were acceptable second-round draft picks, but wouldn’t you rather have Steelers receiver George Pickens?
Tearing the team down required Poles to hold his nose and make a move. Rebuilding requires panache. It’s an exercise in precision and creativity.
Can Poles pull it off? Can Eberflus coach them up?
Eberflus could go 11-6 in his next two seasons and still have a worse winning percentage than former coach Matt Nagy did. Without victories to support his proof of concept, Eberflus spent the season talking about establishing a winning culture and enforcing his H.I.T.S. principle.
‘‘I think one of the main focuses of this year was to build a foundational floor to build up, and I think we did that,’’ he said. ‘‘That’s a credit to those players in that locker room. They did a really good job.’’
In that context, maybe. But by no other definition.
That needs to change. Starting now.
