Alas...

As a closeted Bears fan, I have to admit this was a pretty exciting season. My real team, the Chiefs, crashed and burned early in the year and it was obvious they were not going to make the playoffs so I started spending more time watching my original team, the beloved, than I have for the past ten years or so.

I left them when they became irrelevant to the sport by having head coaches who were clearly not ready to be head coaches and they kept drafting players that they could sign on the cheap instead of players that would make them relevant once again. Not unlike another Chicago team that frustrated me for years, the Blackhawks, by refusing to SHOOT THE PUCK, on power plays, the Bears refused to address their biggest need for forty-five years, an offensive lineman that could block.

It took this version of the monsters a few years to get their feet under them, and fix the mess left behind by the past forty years of mismanagement, but they finally seem to have figured out what it takes to be competitive in the new NFL. Now they just need to figure out how to not waste the first fifty-eight minutes of every game playing grab ass instead of football.

Winning games on the last play, while exciting, is not sustainable and it always comes back to get you once the playoffs start because the other team is usually pretty good themselves. The beloved found this out Sunday night.

If I was the General Manager of the Bears, or any pro football team for that matter, I would tell my head coach, and coordinators, to plan on spending the next month looking at game films of our own team, defense watch offense and vice versa, to find tendencies, tells, and tips that the other side of the ball is showing. Then it is up to the respective coordinators to fix these for next season.

Clearly every team has these and coaches spend all week looking at other teams to identify them so they can game plan against it for the coming game. It only makes sense to look at your own team for the same things. Maybe they already are doing this, I don't know what teams do but if they aren't doing it then I will take credit for the suggestion.

The craziness of this season will make for nice story telling down the road but whomever comes back next season will use the horrible feeling of losing the last game as motivation to make sure the job is finished next season.

For all the Beloved fans, closeted or openly, thank you to the 2025 team for a wild ride.