The Bears have lost defensive end Dayo Odeyingbo for the rest of the season.
Odeyingbo left the locker room on crutches after Sunday’s win over the Bengals and Ian Rapoport of NFL Media reports that he has been diagnosed with a torn Achilles.
The Bears signed Odeyingbo to a three-year, $48 million contract as a free agent in March. He has 21 tackles, two tackles for loss and a sack on the season.
Montez Sweat, Austin Booker, Dominique Robinson, and Daniel Hardy are the other defensive ends on the active roster in Chicago. There was already some thought the Bears could try to bolster their pass rush and the injury news may make them more motivated in the remaining hours before the trade deadline.
The two biggest upsets of the 2025 NFL season happened simultaneously on Sunday, upending the NFC North in the process.
The Panthers were 13-point underdogs, but they beat the Packers 16-13 in Green Bay. That was the biggest upset of this NFL season.
At the same time that the Panthers were pulling off their upset, the 9.5-point underdog Vikings were beating the Lions in Detroit. That was the second-biggest upset of this NFL season. Prior to Sunday, teams favored by more than nine points were 11-0 straight up.
The Packers and Lions are the top two teams in the NFC North, and both of them losing, with the Lions losing to an NFC North rival and the Bears also winning, turned the NFC North into the NFL’s most competitive division. The Packers are now in first place at 5-2-1, the Lions are in second at 5-3, owning the head-to-head tiebreaker over the 5-3 Bears, and a game ahead of the 4-4 Vikings.
What once looked like a two-team race between the Packers and Lions now looks like a four-team race, thanks to two major upsets.
Bears safety Kevin Byard has played a lot of NFL games, but none of them looked quite like the one he was part of in Cincinnati on Sunday.
The Bears took a 14-point lead on the Bengals with under five minutes left and then picked off Joe Flacco on the ensuing drive, so it looked like they would be moving to 5-3 with a road win. A three-and-out sent the ball back to the Bengals and Flacco sandwiched a pair of touchdown passes around a successful onside kick to push the Bengals to a one-point lead with 54 seconds left to play.
That proved to be enough time for quarterback Caleb Williams to connect with tight end Colston Loveland for a 58-yard touchdown and the Bears sealed their 47-42 win by picking Flacco’s Hail Mary off as time expired. When it was all over, Byard said the game was “taking years off my life” and that he’s been around long enough to know that you never look down your nose at a victory.
“We’ll never apologize for winning in this league. It’s very hard to do,” Byard said, via ESPN.com.
The Bears were on the wrong side of some heartbreakers last season and that helps underscore Byard’s point that you have to celebrate wins however they come in the NFL.
After their third day of surrendering more than 500 yards to the opposing offense, Cincinnati’s defensive players weren’t in the mood to discuss their performance.
Via Marshall Kramsky of the WCPO, most of the Bengals’ defensive players declined to speak to reporters following the 47-42 loss to the Bears.
Per Kramsky, two players — defensive end Shemar Stewart and defensive tackle T.J. Slaton — laughed and said, “Catch y’all Monday.”
League rules require all players to be available to the media after each game. Usually when something like this happens, it’s one player.
With 576 yards allowed to the Bears on Sunday, the Bengals are now giving up an average of 426.6 yards per game. That’s the worst in the NFL.
The Bengals blew a 14-point lead in the final minutes of the fourth quarter in their Week 8 loss to the Jets and it looked for a moment on Sunday like they might pull off a comeback of their own against the Bears this week.
Joe Flacco threw touchdown passes to Noah Fant and Andrei Iosivas in less than a minute to put the Bengals up 42-41 with 54 seconds left to play. A defensive stop would have gotten the Bengals a much-needed win, but they gave up a 14-yard run to Caleb Williams on a third down and then let tight end Colston Loveland break free for a 58-yard game-winning touchdown one play later.
After the game, Bengals running back Chase Brown was asked what he was thinking while the Bears were going down to win the game.
“They played really well at the start of the season, they were carrying us on their back. So now that we’re stepping up, we just got to play complementary football,” Brown said, via James Rapien of SI.com. “We put the ball in the end zone and go up a point at the end, finish the f—king game. Like, just end it. That’s what we need to do. Just end the f—king game. Get us the ball back. Let us f—king go to 22 victory, and let’s end the game. That’s how I feel.”
NFL researcher Dante Koplovitz-Fleming noted that the Bengals are the first team in the Super Bowl era to allow 500-plus yards, 38-plus points and have zero takeaways in consecutive games. The Bengals made a big change on defense by hiring Al Golden as their coordinator after the unit’s disappointing 2024 season, but it looks like they’ll need to make more of them to get the team where it needs to be.
