By losing two straight games against the playoff-bound Green Bay Packers and Minnesota Vikings, the Seattle Seahawks find themselves in need of help if they are to make the playoffs. The Hawks and all their fans will be pulling hard for the Arizona Cardinals to knock off Los Angeles on Saturday night, which might set up an epic showdown between the Seahawks and the Rams in the final week of the season. But in order for that to happen, Seattle must go on the road and beat the Bears this Thursday.
On paper, that does not appear to be a very difficult task. The Bears, who began the year with such high hopes, have now lost nine straight games. Though several of those losses have been razor-thin heartbreakers, more than half of them have been by more than two touchdowns. They have dropped their last three games by an average of 20 points.
Of course, that means nothing come Thursday. We have all seen teams in turmoil find the pride to play well when all is lost. The Bears would like nothing more than to snap their crushing losing streak and ruin another team’s Christmas. Let’s take a quick look at the team Seattle faces on Thursday night, with the 2024 season on the line.
What Seattle Seahawks fans need to know about the Chicago Bears before the Week 17 matchup
Bears last season
The Bears had a forgettable 2023. They beat up on some of the league’s cellar dwellers but were rarely competitive against good teams. But Bears fans did have reason to be optimistic. They showed signs of life late in the season. That included an inspiring two-game run after Thanksgiving which saw them beat division rivals Minnesota and Detroit. They won two more games in December to go 4-2 over their final six. They finished at 7-9, a nice step up from a very poor 2022 season.
Bears fans were watching what another team was doing with even greater interest. With every new loss by the Carolina Panthers, Chicago saw its hopes for 2024 improve. Before the 2023 draft, Chicago had traded its first-round pick – number one overall – to Carolina for a haul that included star receiver D.J. Moore and the Panthers' first-round pick in 2024. When Carolina tanked the 2023 season, it left the Bears with the top overall pick and a shot at one of several elite QB prospects.
They had what looked to be a good young roster, decent cap space, and a lot of high-level draft picks to play with. The future looked very bright.
Bears' offseason
General manager Ryan Poles was very active in the off-season. Poles had spent his entire career with Kansas City before coming to Chicago in 2022 and theoretically was well positioned to upgrade the Bears’ talent.
He had begun that upgrade in 2023, by making trades for both Moore and disruptive pass rusher Montez Sweat. He pulled off another trade by bringing standout veteran receiver Keenan Allen in from the Chargers. Then, he signed pass catchers Gerald Everett, Dante Pettis, and D’Andre Carter to give more options to whoever turned out to be the Bears' QB in 2024. Carter was also likely to improve the Bears' return game.
Poles was far from done. He signed D’Andre Swift to be the team’s primary ball carrier, and Coleman Shelton, Matt Pryor, and former Seahawk Jake Curhan to help bolster the offensive line. He made another trade for Ryan Bates to add even more O-line depth. On defense, he signed safeties Kevin Byard and Jonathan Owens to provide veteran leadership for a talented young secondary.
All of those moves were preludes to the main event – the 2024 draft. Poles had one huge decision. Stay with up-and-down QB Justin Fields, who had been the Bears top pick in the 2021 draft, or move on from him and choose his replacement with the first pick in 2024. Poles chose to trade Fields and select USC’s Caleb Williams, the 2022 Heisman Trophy winner, to be the new face of the franchise.
With so much draft capital, Poles was able to double down on offense by taking Rome Odunze with the ninth overall pick. That meant Williams would play his rookie season with a very gifted receiving corps featuring Moore, Allen, and Odunze at receiver, with Cole Kmet and Gerald Everett at tight end. Rookie QBs rarely are blessed with so much firepower.
With a developing young offensive line and an aggressive defense, Chicago entered the 2024 season as a dark-horse choice to make the playoffs.
Poles and head coach Matt Eberflus made one other major decision that didn’t receive much attention at the time. At the close of the 2024 season, the team fired much of its offensive coaching staff, including coordinator Luke Getsy. The move was not unexpected. To replace him, they hired a name well-known to Hawks fans – Shane Waldron.
The Bears' season
A season that began with such promise seemed to crumble in the space of one play. The Bears were 4-2 and coming off a bye when they traveled to Washington for a marquee matchup between the top two picks in the 2024 draft.
The Commanders dominated most of the game, but the Bears' defense came up big time after time in the red zone, holding Washington to a lot of short field goals. Late in the contest, Williams and the offense found a spark and roared back from a 12-0 deficit to take a 15-12 lead with just 25 seconds remaining.
That’s when a rookie QB legend was born. Unfortunately for Chicago, the rookie was not Caleb Williams. It was the player they passed on, Washington’s Jayden Daniels. Daniels completed a 52-yard Hail Mary to Noah Brown on the game’s final play to win the game. The play went viral in part because Bears’ cornerback Tyrique Stevenson was not even watching the field as the ball was being snapped. He was taunting Commanders’ fans with his back to the play. Video of the play became a symbol of an immature, underperforming team.
Whether fair or not, the impact has been undeniable. The Bears have not won a game since losing to Washington. They come into the Seattle game riding a nine-game losing streak. Along the way, they have been blown out and they have found creative and agonizing ways to lose close games. They fired Waldron as their OC less than a year after hiring him. They fired Eberflus a few weeks later.
The Bears still have talent, but several things have become clear through the course of 2024. On defense, despite having solid players like Sweat, Gervon Dexter, Jaylon Johnson, and Byard, they have not been able to make enough plays to offset an anemic offense.
Though they are on pace to surrender about the same number of points as last year and generate more sacks, there have been disturbing trends. They are not creating as many turnovers as in 2023. They are giving up better than a half-yard more per play, with a very poor step back in their ability to stop the run. Worst of all, they went from being the least penalized defense in the NFL to being one of the most penalized this year. That has only supported the narrative that Chicago is an immature, undisciplined club.
If it has been bad on defense, it has been even worse on offense, and much of that has fallen on the shoulders of Caleb Williams. The Bears have other problems to be sure, but the simple fact is that Williams has played like a rookie in his rookie season. He has taken bad sacks. His accuracy has been very inconsistent. Though he has shown flashes of the talent that had everyone excited when the season began, he has not played well this year.
His confidence, which was seen as a positive a few short months ago, is now viewed by a lot of fans as arrogance. Right after the draft, he texted fellow rookie Tory Taylor that he wouldn’t be punting very much this year. Fans loved it. Taylor is currently tied for third in total punts this year, and fans aren’t so happy.
In hindsight, it has become customary to lay the blame on Waldron, who proved incapable of designing an offense in which his rookie could thrive. But a more realistic view might be that Williams is going through normal adjustment pains. The recent success of rookies like C.J. Stroud, Jayden Daniels, and Bo Nix has raised the bar for all rookies.
But the fact is that Daniels and Nix played in a lot more games and threw a lot more passes in college than Williams did. They are much farther along. There is no guarantee that Williams will ever live up to his hype, especially if the Bears don’t bring in a quality coach/coordinator to help him grow, but it is too early to make any final determination. Sam Darnold has been proof of that this season.
Chicago is a struggling team. Seattle should be able to move the ball against them and should force Williams into bad plays. But on a cold December night at Soldier Field, it’s likely the Bears are going to be desperate for a win. D.J. remains a dangerous playmaker. Montez Sweat can still knock down passes and quarterbacks with the best of them. Seattle needs to play well to keep playoff hopes alive.