The Bears are a team good enough to win Super Bowl LIV. There’s a ton of roster talent in place. Matt Nagy proved himself to have a deft coaching touch. There’s a noticeably positive, optimistic vibe inside the walls of the newly-renovated Halas Hall.
There, too, are valid questions about this team. Is Mitch Trubisky a Super Bowl-caliber quarterback? Will the defense take a step back from its soaring 2018 heights? Is Eddy Pineiro the solution to the kicking issues that’ve plagued this team for years? Is the depth good enough?
But, for a second, let’s not get caught up in the minutiae of this team with the beginning of its 100th season quickly approaching. We won’t begin to know the answers to those questions until Thursday night. The big picture here is this, again: It’s legitimately reasonable to expect the Bears to win a Super Bowl in five months based on the team Ryan Pace and Nagy assembled.
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“Our expectations are always high, really high,” Pace said. “… We've done a lot of work this offseason, the team's put in a lot of hard work, the coaches put in a lot of hard work. We'll see.”
While it’s notable for the Bears to have Super Bowl expectations, given those haven’t been realistic in a long time entering a season around here, it’s also a far-reaching thought. So let’s take a little more narrow view of the upcoming regular season, and say this:
For the Bears to make the Super Bowl for the third time in franchise history, or to win the Super Bowl for the second time, they need to secure a first-round bye.
No team since the 2012 Baltimore Ravens has made the Super Bowl without a first-round bye (the Ravens won that Super Bowl). Twenty-one of the 29 Super Bowl champions in the NFL’s current playoff format were No. 1 or No. 2 seeds. That may feel like a far-off thing for this Bears team to achieve, but look no further than last year’s playoffs for why it matters.
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Instead of sitting at home over wild card weekend, the Bears had to play the defending Super Bowl champions, only to lose on Cody Parkey’s infamous double-doink. Would the Bears have gone to Los Angeles and beat the Rams the next week had Parkey’s kick gone in? Maybe. But we’ll never know.
Instead, the Rams steamrolled Dallas in their divisional round game, got a massive break in the NFC Championship and played for a Super Bowl. The Bears were left to stew about all the things that went wrong in the playoffs up to and including the double-doink.
“We’re always striving for greatness, and that wasn’t good enough,” Pace said. [It] left a sour taste in all of our mouths. It drives you. We’re all competitors. That’s not a good feeling. You’re either getting better or you’re getting worse and our goal is to continue to get better.”
The Bears’ window to win a Super Bowl is firmly open, but those windows can shut quickly. 2019’s roster is stacked with talent, and capitalizing on that collection of talent is paramount.
And the best way to do that? Earn a first-round bye.
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