Without the luxury of some order of succession, which the NFL obviously lacks, in order to be the king, you must first seize his crown and throne. The Bears did that in 2018, ripping the headgear and seating away from the Green Bay Packers and winning the division comfortably with just one loss, and pulling even further away from the NFC North vs. the conference, winning four more than second-best Minnesota’s six in the conference.
But to truly become the king requires holding the crown against all challengers, and that is perhaps the overarching theme of the Bears season. Because the Bears have grabbed the NFC North crown from Green Bay and Aaron Rodgers before and had it brutally ripped away, more than once in the first year of a new head coach with all the accompanying upbeat buzz.
The point: A win means nothing, sometimes less than nothing if it is followed by a backslide. And that has happened too often.
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The Bears in 2015, John Fox’s first year, defeated the Packers in their second meeting, then followed that with consecutive losses (involving catastrophic Robbie Gould missed field goals) and finished 6-10 as the Packers were on their way to a wild card.
They defeated the Packers in 2013, Marc Trestman’s first year, reaching 5-3 in the process, then ended that season with a home loss to Green Bay and missed the playoffs. They won their first Green Bay game in 2010, only to have the Packers step over them in the playoffs on their way to winning a Super Bowl.
Rodgers and the Packers always regained their throne. Even when the Vikings slipped in ahead of them (’15), the king returned. Indeed, 2017-18 is the first time in a decade that the Packers have gone more than one year without reestablishing their reign in the division.
It is a different “king” this year, the same Rodgers (a little older maybe) but a different head coach. And Green Bay head coaches haven’t done well in their first meetings with the Bears. Mike McCarthy was blown out 26-0 in his debut. Mike Sherman before him (2000), Ray Rhodes before that, Mike Holmgren – all first-game losers to the Bears. Even Joe Philbin, filling in after McCarthy’s firing last season – loser. McCarthy and Holmgren even had Brett Favre, albeit at vastly different points of Favre’s career.
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But the deeper point is that even with the nice boost from an early win over an incoming Green Bay coach, the Bears always found themselves unable to consolidate any apparent gain on a team that has dominated this division on a scale approaching that of what New England has done in the AFC East.
Matt Nagy got something critically important across to his team back in November last season. He correctly assessed that the Bears had gone from being the hunters, a woeful team scratching for wins, to the hunted, a playoff-bound team pulling away from its division virtually with every passing week of 2018.
The Bears come into 2019 and Thursday’s meeting with the former king with an understanding of what has happened and can happen, even within a game. The latter was driven painfully home in game one last year, holding a 20-point lead on an injured King Aaron with 19 minutes to play and experiencing what many, many Bears teams have learned over too many years. The Bears did recover, used the lesson from that game, in fact, while the Packers never quite did in an unusually (for Green Bay) dysfunctional year.
Nagy proved an apt learner in his first year and having Rodgers and the Packers rip game one away from him was a lesson for the 2018 season and apparently into this one.
“It can be very easy as a coaching staff if you do that, you look ahead too far too soon,” Nagy said. “It becomes one of those ‘Super Bowl weeks’ that you hear about where you’re prepping so much or you’re putting so much stuff in that it ends up getting the best of you. So there’s that balance.
“And then again, too, you have this group of kids, this is a very important game for them. Just going through this process before for us and having experienced coaches, you rely on them and you don’t go too crazy.”
“Crazy” lurks in allowing the seeming gains of Nagy’s first year against Green Bay to ebb away, the way they did for Dick Jauron, Lovie Smith and Trestman, who all won their first games against the Packers and Favre/Rodgers but never built from that into truly being the king for more than a year at a time, if that.
To truly become the king means more than just beating Green Bay. But no one ever remains king for long if they don’t dispatch the old king.
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