If you want to run with the big dogs, you go to Seattle, line up across from the defending Super Bowl champions and take your chances in front of a “Monday Night Football” audience.
So what if the Seahawks came in with the best all-time winning percentage in prime time of any NFL team? Or if they’d won 28 times in their last 37 night games at Lumen Field?
The Bears have Caleb Williams. And Ben Johnson. And now — gosh, is it real? — Jeffery Simmons. There’s no dog big enough to scare them anymore. Nose to nose. Growl for growl. Bite for bite. Let’s get it on.
At least, that was the Bears’ plan.
The Seahawks were facing a big dog, too, after all. At least, that was the football universe’s assumption. The moment news broke Thursday that the Bears had traded a pair of first-round picks to the Titans for transcendent defensive tackle Simmons, the Bears became the NFL’s “it” team. A good team? No, a potentially great one. A decent bet to get back to the playoffs? No, a leading Super Bowl contender.
Pick a gambling site, any gambling site, and what you would have found as Monday’s kickoff arrived was that the Bears had the best odds to win the Super Bowl of any team in the NFC North, the only division in which every team has a winning record. They were right there with the Bills, 49ers, Chiefs, Jaguars and Seahawks. That’s some serious company to keep.
And as the Bears were closing out a 34-17 win, the odds of them winning it all were getting even shorter.
Many reporters nearly pulled hamstrings rushing to frame Bears-Seahawks as a “potential preview of the NFC Championship Game,” never mind the fact it's no certainty either of these teams — let alone both of them — will even make the postseason field. The Bears are in good shape at 6-2, but the Seahawks are 4-4 and 2½ games behind the 49ers in the NFC West.
As for the Bears' hopes, this is where I begin to rain on the Super Bowl parade you’ve already been dreaming about with a few cautionary tales.
Don’t we remember the Cowboys’ early-November trade last year for perennial Pro Bowl defensive tackle Quinnen Williams? That blockbuster deal was intended to be a season saver, which, of course, it wasn’t. The Cowboys have gone 7-9 since then, owner Jerry Jones having last been seen cursing from his suite Sunday as the finishing touches were put on another humiliating defeat.
Don’t we remember the 7-2 Colts trading two first-rounders for cornerback Sauce Gardner last year? It worked out so well, the Colts are 3-13 since then, fired general manager Chris Ballard and are in fire-sale mode.
Just before last season, the Packers traded two first-rounders for edge rusher extraordinaire Micah Parsons, then gave him a $186 million contract extension ($112 million of it guaranteed). He tore an ACL in their 14th game, they crumbled down the stretch and now they’re still waiting for him to work his way back onto the field.
When the Rams went all-in to get sack king Myles Garrett before this season, did they imagine themselves eight games in, at 4-4, and Garrett having zero sacks after missing seven games with a knee injury? Of course they didn’t, yet here they are.
The Bears have gone all-in, too.
“I know the ‘all-in’ narrative is there,” GM Ryan Poles said, “[but] we were all-in from the moment we started training camp this year.”
Simmons’ arrival kicked everything up a notch, though. The Bears are big dogs now. Or are they?
It’s boom or bust. That’s as clear as a Great Dane’s bark.
Caleb Williams for MVP? Beating top opponents at night with the world watching is what elite QBs do. About that ceiling? The thing is, there might not be one.
The Jeffery Simmons Factor: Put that bad fella at the tip of the defensive spear and — just like that — everything changes. Does “D” stand for “dominate” going forward?
Look Out, NFC North: Are the Bears — despite their 0-2 start in division games — going to win the North again? You’d better believe they’re the favorites now.
