Bears go from Black Friday high to Pack Sunday low. Will one-sided rivalry with Packers ever change?
GREEN BAY, Wis. — Oh, yeah, that’s what a loss to the archrival Packers feels like.
Like a slippery can of Spotted Cow tossed through waiting hands and off the bridge of the nose. Like a splash of boiling brat water in the eye. Like moldy cheese curds the morning after.
Like, not great, can we all agree on that?
But lose to the Packers, the Bears did — 28-21 this time, hard-fought and all — in the latest first meeting between the teams in any season since 1998.
Welcome back to ritual misery, everybody.
“It’s never fun to lose to those guys,” tight end Cole Kmet said, speaking for all of Beardom whether he intended to or not.
On the other hand, a soul-crushing defeat, this was not. The Bears fought back from 11 points down at the half to tie it at 21-21 in the fourth quarter. They drove into the red zone at the end with a chance — a great one — to take the game to overtime. Even after finishing on the wrong end of things against the Packers for the 22nd time in the last 26 meetings, they’re 9-4 and only a half-game behind the Packers in the NFC North.
These teams meet again, you know, two weeks hence at Soldier Field.
“Everything we want to do is still in front of us,” running back D’Andre Swift said. “We just let one slip today. We’ll see them again soon.”
And the question we’ll have to wait to see answered further in the rematch is: Where does the gap between the Packers and the Bears really stand? Is it as wide as ever in a purportedly great rivalry that continues to be outrageously one-sided? Or is it on the verge of disappearing, with the Bears on the move thanks to a hot new coach, a still-enticing No. 1 quarterback and better mojo than they’ve had at any point over the last several years?
“There ain’t no gap,” Swift said. “We lost on the last play of the game. No gap at all.”
The Bears were coming off their highest high since 2018 — a 24-15 win on the road against the Super Bowl champion Eagles on Black Friday. All too briefly, as it turns out, it lifted them to the top of the NFC standings. Take the North? How about taking the whole damn conference?
But they took the field the very next time and it quickly turned into Lack Sunday. All first half against the Packers, the Bears couldn’t throw the ball — could hardly manage a first down — nor could they cover Packers receivers or stop Packers quarterback Jordan Love from operating the sort of ease Williams has yet to display. It began to look like an exposé of all the necessary qualities this Bears team doesn’t have.
In the end, after the Bears had played much better — offensively, at least — throughout the second half and gave their tormentors all they could handle, it was still another Pack Sunday. Not a soul-crusher, nor even all that discouraging, but a sour taste nonetheless.
“We’ll go right back to work,” coach Ben Johnson said. “We have a process that we believe in.”
The Bears are five games over .500 yet minus-one in point differential on the season. Compare that with the 9-3-1 Packers, who are plus-75, not to mention the 8-5 Lions (plus-90), the 10-3 Rams (plus-152) and the 9-4 49ers (plus-133), and skepticism begins to rear its head dramatically.
More pressingly, the Bears are 1-3 in the division, a far cry from the Packers’ 4-0.
“The division in general is a very tough division,” Johnson said. “All four teams are neck-and-neck and battling it out.
“I think our guys were confident coming into the game that we were going to come away with a ‘W’ in this one, and we fell short.”
After a no-lose November — five Bears wins — a drop-dead December would be the worst thing imaginable. But a playoff-worthy team wouldn’t let that happen.
“We’ll be a playoff team once we earn enough wins to become a playoff team,” Johnson said. “Right now, we’re a nine-win team and I don’t think nine wins is going to get you in this year.”
A playoff-worthy team would knock around the lowly Browns next weekend at Soldier Field and then lick its chops with the Packers coming in.
“Across the board, man, we feel really confident about where we are as a team and what we can be going forward,” Kmet said.
And about closing the gap between them and the Packers?
“I’m sure people on the outside feel there’s a gap, but we don’t see it like that,” Kmet said. “If other people do, that’s on them.”
Other people do. Anyone who has paid even vague attention to this decades-long Bears-Packers fiasco would.
The nose aches, the eye stings and the gut howls after yet another Bears “L,” but this, too, shall pass.
Maybe?