You never want to overstate things, never want to blow them up out of realistic proportions or make them bigger than they actually are, but sometimes . . .
In the early stages of Egyptian mythology, there was a bird with feathers of scarlet and gold. They referred to the oversized eagle, undersized pterodactyl as a phoenix. A bird that flew to the “City of the Sun” (Heliopolis) to immolate itself on the altar of the sun’s fire only to rise from those ashes to become a younger version of itself.
The phoenix is often viewed as an allegory for resurrection, for life after death, what one can become when one survives walking through the fire. And the fire next time.
The 2024 Bears are dead. Their string of improbable, incompetent ways to lose games will go down in Chicago sports infamy. And as much as many have made and will make of the epically mismanaged last 32 seconds (profoundly, the last 12 seconds) of Thursday’s collapse, the core of their latest, possibly most damning loss can be found and targeted to the game’s first 30 minutes.
(Reducing that loss to just clock mismanagement is a cop-out.)
Not saying that it was a microcosm or a snapshot of what the future of the Bears looks like (or indicates how much work the Bears need), but that Thanksgiving Day first half against the Lions represents everything.
Before Tyrique Stevenson’s last-minute forced fumble on the 6-yard line, the Bears had 22 yards and no first downs. Then the three overthrows, one missed pass-interference call, a throwaway on the last play and Matt Eberflus’ no-worries, everything’s-good, it-is-what-it-is demeanor during his on-field halftime interview with Tracy Wolfson (which fully explains his ‘‘I like what we did there” final-sequence postgame comment) reinforced how truly deep the waters are when it comes to what the Bears have to swim themselves out of.
In a game to avoid losing six in a row, with zero road wins, the time of possession in that first half displayed the everything of everything: Lions, 23 minutes; Bears, seven minutes. Dead.
The power to play from behind as a norm is not a power.
The switch-flippin’ ain’t it. The bilateral, schizophrenic, anti-symmetrical culture that has shaped not just their performances and style of play but apparently their overall approach to each game is not the formula on which any “winning culture” has ever been built. The actuality that all season long they’ve only had one opening lead in a game, a lead that lasted all of 59 seconds, should be all they need to reinforce to themselves that the cruel way in which some of their losses have occurred is not the problem. S—’s way bigger than that.
Bigger than the Eberflus removal.
At some point what they are and what they are capable of becoming (same with Caleb Williams) have to separate from one another. And as written in a predicted Week 1 column that once they go three games under .500, “we [would] turn on one another and on the Bears.” They stand at four games under today.
Even if the Bears had found a way to win that game Thursday, turning the second half into another of their cardiac game plans, how it takes them so long to wake up and ball and why — even in the most desperate of games — they wait until second halves to put on display any signs of life is the most high-priority mystery that needs to be solved over the next 12 months. (Meaning we will be revisiting this — or some other — problematic issue next Thanksgiving. Trust.)
It was Keenan Allen who said after the loss, ‘‘I feel like we did enough as players to win the game.” No. You all did enough as players to win the second half of the game. When your QB has a 132.3 passer rating in the second half of a game and still finishes the game with a sub-100 rating, that’s the ever-so-substantive indicator needed to digest how winning only half of a game does not win games.
Making their non-opening-kickoff mentality and non-60-plus-minute desire as a team even more pressing than the Eberflus firing, more exigent than removing the interim tag on Thomas Brown’s head-coach status or bringing him back as OC, more crucial than any masterminding Ryan Poles is contemplating to correct the wrongs he felt he corrected that ended up blowing up in his and the organization’s face.
There’s always something to be said about those who make it beyond their own crashes and burns, who make it through the fire. If anything moving forward needs to be put into a capsule, Thursday’s first half should be it. It should be the Bears’ case study of selves, their self-evaluating dossier. Of all things that have happened to them, by them, regardless of how the rest of this season turns out, that 30 minutes should be their sun.
Always that reminder of what rock bottom looks and feels like. That’s usually the point from which all phoenixes rise.