Answers. Still looking for them. Still waiting for something — anything! — to present itself, allowing us to land on what these Bears are about and, more important, who they are.
Reality. Still avoiding it. Still in denial. Still waiting for something — everything! — to disappear so that we don’t have to face the facts surrounding this team that might break us. More important, break them.
Are we looking for answers or are we trying to avoid reality?
Here we be, Week 5, and that “Who are we? What are we made of?” crisis game has arrived. Do we know who the Bears are? Do we have any idea? Do they? And isn’t this the game it all comes together or all falls apart when they and we find out?
The yeses, the noes. The ever-important silence. Yet the crossroads that have the Bears in the NFL crosshairs of uncertainty might be the reality we are so terrified of.
Because the Week 5 reality, deeply ingrained in if they win or lose and how they win or lose, has the power to further confirm that the Bears have zero control over who and what they are because every other thing adjacent to them already has answered that for us.
(Note: Why they are what they are is a whole different bye-week column.)
When a team in your division (the Vikings) beat the team you lost to the previous week (the Texans) 34-7 and is undefeated in four games and another team in the same division (the Packers) looked better against the team you beat in Week 1 (the Titans) without their QB1, Jordan Love, and when neither of those teams is the one in the division (the Lions) expected to end the season crowned, there are questions. Those realities alone only alter optimism by exposing that the problems the last team in that division (the Bears) are dealing with are far more than internal.
Written differently, the Bears could improve all they want from week to week for the rest of the season and still find themselves at the bottom of the NFC North at season’s end. Just as they are now.
And this is without mentioning the outside noise generated by Jayden Daniels, the rookie QB selected after Caleb Williams at No. 2 by the Commanders, doing what he’s doing, having the greatest completion rate (91%) in a game of any rookie in NFL history in his Week 3 coming-out ‘‘Monday Night Football’’ party. Forcing ESPN’s ‘‘Get Up’’ to have an entire segment on the show titled, “Did the Bears make a mistake drafting Caleb Williams over Jayden Daniels?”
And without mentioning the ever-evolving storyline of Justin Fields taking the Steelers to a 3-0 record for the first time in four years (3-1 going into Week 5) and playing in a way that has put almost all of the shortcomings he had squarely and unquestionably on the people within the Bears’ organization whose core job was to develop him and set him up to succeed. Neither of which was done. But mentioning that would be petty, right?
The Ravens are 2-2, and there are some who consider them the best team in the NFL, the ones still with the best chance and the squad to win the Super Bowl. On the other end, them Cowboys are 2-2, and there are some who are calling them the most disappointing team in the NFL and believe they won’t make the playoffs and should consider tanking away the rest of the season. The Bears at 2-2 sit somewhere in between. Week 5 purgatory. A team that has underachieved more than it has overachieved. A team whose opponents have these NFL.com power rankings: Texans (5), Colts (16), Rams (23) and Titans (26). The Panthers, this week, are 31. Next week’s team, the Jaguars, sit below them at 32, last in the NFL. Providing a pretty low denominator to gauge who the Bears authentically are.
Unfortunately, regardless of what the Bears do this Sunday, even with a 63% FPI chance of winning, we might have to confront the answers we’re not willing to deal with. Hidden in direct sight but too hard to accept. Answers we aren’t prepared to face because as Bears non-believers will tell us: “Y’all can’t handle the answers!” And they’d be right.
It would take us owning the reality that the Bears’ best-case scenario coming true over the next 13 weeks still has the chance of not being enough. This “figuring it out” stage that Williams keeps repeating can no longer be the fallback once they start playing the three tiers of teams — the ones that are actually better than them; the ones that have nothing at all to lose when the Bears play them; those three damn aforementioned ones inside the NFC North — that occupy the bulk of their remaining schedule.
Answers. Reality. Ugh.
At some point after questions are asked, all one can do is wait for an answer. Sometimes it’s the silence that follows those questions that tells you all you need to know.