With 2:14 remaining in Thursday night’s Seahawks-Bears matchup a familiar chant of ‘sell the team’ echoed across Solider Field as interim head coach Thomas Brown sent his punt team on the field.
The Bears faced a fourth down at their 35-yard line after left-guard Jake Curhan turned a fourth in inches to fourth and five with a false start penalty. As the chorus boo birds rang, Brown had a sudden change of heart and called a timeout so he could send the offense back on the field.
The decision appeared to pay off as quarterback Caleb Williams marched the Bears to Seattle’s 40-yard line after a nifty fourth down conversion to DJ Moore on fourth down followed by a 15-yard completion to Rome Odunze. From then on the offense failed to gain another yard.
The Bears let time bleed off the clock, burned their second timeout after an incompletion, launched a deep ball on 3rd and 10 despite only needing a few yards to get inside yards Cairo Santos’ field goal range, and threw a back-breaking interception. It was shades of the Thanksgiving Day clock mismanagement all over again. A fitting ending to an ugly 6-3 loss in which Chicago totaled 179 yards of offense and allowed seven sacks.
The Bear’s 10th straight loss and the second time in four months that a Chicago team lost to Seattle 6-3 this year. One hundred and fifty-one days earlier the White Sox lost 6-3 to the Seattle Mariners. The July 28th loss marked the White Sox’s 13th loss in a streak that would eventually expand to a record-setting 21 games.
It’s hard to believe that Chicago could be a more embarrassing team than the White Sox. Jerry Reinsdorf’s club set a modern record of 121 losses with a whopping -306 run differential. But the Bears might have a legitimate argument.
Flash forward to December 26th and chants of ‘sell the team’ are all too familiar for South Siders who have begged Jerry Reinsdoft for years to relinquish power. With the loss to the Seahawks on Thursday, the Bears are on track to finish the season with a worse losing percentage than the White Sox. While they may not have set any records for ineptitude, McCaskey’s team entered the season with high expectations.
Bears general manager Ryan Poles made bold proclamations about “taking the North and never getting it back”, while White Sox GM Chris Getz started his tenure talking about how he doesn’t “like our team.” The White Sox were coming off a 101-loss season and traded their best-starting pitcher in the offseason. The Bears were riding the momentum of a late 2023 surge with the number one overall pick and array of weapons.
Like the White Sox, the Monster of the Midway has seemed to find new ways to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. As Garrett Crochet put it, “I remember so many games where I would get in the car on the way home and be like, ‘What the [heck] just happened?’
Rainsoaked Bears fans left Solider Field with a similar sentiment Thursday night. Their ten-game losing streak has consisted of two games where they failed to score a touchdown at home, several blowout losses, including one on Monday Night Football, an overtime loss, a blocked field goal, letting the clock run out with a chance to tie the game on Thanksgiving, and a heartbreaking hail mary.
With the McCaskey’s and Reinsdorf’s in town success has been few and far between. Bears head coach Matt Eberflus was fired mid-way through the season while calls for Poles jobs have grown louder. Even the firing was botched, with the Bears brass trotting Eberflus out for a press conference hours before canning him.
The White Sox also parted ways with their skipper Pedro Grfiol mid-way through the season but hired highly sought-after manager, Will Venable. Meanwhile, Bears fans are crossing their fingers hoping the organization won’t screw up another coaching hire. That’s no consolation to White Sox fans who are also hoping their organization won’t screw up another rebuild.
There are a lot of similarities between these two big-market teams that operate like dysfunctional mom-and-pop shops. But given the hype surrounding the Bears this offseason, it’s hard to view any other team as a bigger disappointment in 2024.
