100th season will end with a thud
At the end of a highly anticipated season, the Bears are left to deal with a meaningless finale.
The Bears will play a buzz-free game against the Vikings on Sunday afternoon in Minneapolis, then return home and scatter fairly quickly for the offseason.
End of season. End of story. Deep sigh. It’s all so routine, so empty, so familiar. This is the official and unceremonious end to the Bears’ 100th season.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this on the regular season’s final weekend, with so little to be excited about and even less to play for.
This was supposed to be a time of grand celebration, one of the NFL’s charter franchises preparing for the postseason, readying to host at least one January game, locking its focus on a return to glory.
You remember all the anticipation, all the excitement, all the belief from February through August. Much of Chicago was intoxicated by realistic visions of returning to the Super Bowl.
A winning season felt like a given. The biggest question was how much winning there would be. Even for a franchise that has had inexplicable difficulty sustaining any kind of high-level success, the forecast for 2019 was warm and sunny.
That was the consensus. And that was certainly the expectation for the most optimistic die-hards. This was the franchise’s 100th season, the perfect stage and setting for a storybook run.
The Bears had one of the NFL’s fiercest defenses to lead them. Difference makers from front to back. An All-Pro gamewrecker in Khalil Mack.
They also had the league’s reigning coach of the year, Matt Nagy, to guide an offensive breakthrough while developing Pro Bowl quarterback Mitch Trubisky. After a 12-4 run to a division championship in 2018, even if that record would be difficult to match, another step or two in the right direction seemed inevitable.
Remember that high-energy June weekend in Rosemont? The Bears100 convention that simultaneously served as a celebration of the team’s history and as a pep rally for 2019?
Near the end of that event’s opening ceremony, Nagy told a supercharged audience that he and his team welcomed the expectations. “You think there’s pressure?” Nagy said. “Of course there is. But we like pressure. Let’s go get this thing!”
Not long after, Nagy yelled, “Boom!” and dropped the mic and set off a mini Club
Dub celebration on stage.
That adrenaline rush continued on the opening day of training camp, when Tarik Cohen zipped onto the Olivet Nazarene University campus in his Slingshot, the flashiest arrival of a day in which Super Bowl talk continued to circulate.
“Everybody’s expecting us to do more this year,” Cohen acknowledged. “You know, take it to the Super Bowl. That’s what we expect of ourselves.”
Seven weeks later, with the rival Packers in town, with fighter jets roaring overhead and with Jim Cornelison crushing the national anthem, the Bears’ 100th season began with unmistakable electricity. It felt captivating. It felt like a launching pad.
But then Nagy’s team lost that opener 10-3. It lost four straight games in midseason. It has lost eight times overall.
The defense has been pretty good but not nearly as good as advertised. And the offense, with four months of inconsistency and too many Trubisky errors, remains a clunky and unproductive operation that has fans arguing over how to divvy blame between the quarterback, the offensiveminded head coach and the general manager who invested in both.
Last summer, no one had that uncomfortable debate penciled on the itinerary for the first few days of 2020.
This was supposed to be a season of confirmation that the Bears had opened a window of opportunity for the next several years. Instead, their playoff hopes died a week and a half before Christmas, and they find themselves stuck in third place.
Now this is all that is left. Fairly meaningless Week 17 business. This buzzfree game against the Vikings. A chance to finish .500.
These are final unsatisfactory stages of the franchise’s 100th season.