Bear Digest

Better seeding is only part of what the Bears can gain against 49ers

The way the Bears see it, their lack of postseason experience is only being improved by a schedule with tough opponents loaded at the back end.
Gene Chamberlain|
Tremaine Edmunds comes up with the football after Nahshon Wright stripped it in Saturday's 22-16 Bears overtime win over the Packers.
Tremaine Edmunds comes up with the football after Nahshon Wright stripped it in Saturday's 22-16 Bears overtime win over the Packers. | Mike Dinovo-Imagn Images

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Chicago Bears

Now that they're in the postseason dance, the goal for the Bears becomes positioning and more learning.

There are no easy games in the playoffs, and home field can mean everything. The Bears experienced a playoff-type atmosphere at home Saturday night by beating the Packers. They can find out what it's like on the road when they travel to play another playoff team Sunday night at San Francisco.

The Bears can still take the big prize of top seed and get a week off to heal before the playoffs at Soldier Field, and there are a few on their roster with enough experience to tell them what that can mean. They only need two wins and a Seattle loss to either the Panthers or 49ers to do it.

Regardless of their seed, they'll get at least one home playoff game by clinching the NFC North with either one more win or one loss by Green Bay.

“I think the easiest thing for me even communicating that is telling guys, 'Hey, you remember how that Green Bay game felt right?' " said linebacker Tremaine Edmunds, a veteran of seven Buffalo playoff games. "And I think guys learn off experience, even though I can go tell them ‘this is my experience,’ which I will.

"That was a playoff atmosphere this past Saturday. So, guys are going to understand like what it feels like, guys are going to see the atmosphere, the emotion, everything that goes behind it. And, that's going to, it should motivate you. It's just like that even in Buffalo, that's how it was there. Anytime you can have your home crowd, playing in front of your home city, and just having that energy, getting that momentum from the home crowd and just hearing how loud it is, it's definitely in your favor."

The Bears as a team haven't had a home  playoff game since the double-doink loss to Philadelphia after the 2018 season.

Their last postseason experience was the 2020 game in New Orleans and only Cole Kmet and Jaylon Johnson as rookies and kicker Cairo Santos remain from that team, although Johnson didn't play due to injury. C.J. Gardner-Johnson played in it for the opponents and managed to help get Bears receiver Anthony Miller booted from the game.

The 49ers might look like the wrong team for the Bears to face at this point, but they're actually good prep.

The 49ers come into Sunday night's game with five straight wins by an average of 16.4 points, but when they won Monday night it was the Colts' fifth straight loss and sixth in seven games during a total collapse. The only other winning team the 49ers beat in this streak was Carolina, a .500 team at the time. The other three teams were Cleveland, Tennessee and Arizona—teams with a combined 9-36 record.

The Bears played the soft part of their schedule early, but feel as if their recent run of games provided proper playoff preparation. They went 3-1 against teams seeded in the playoffs currently and also routed Cleveland.

This game with San Francisco and the finale with Detroit are also good postseason prep.   

"These last games that are coming up now, all these games are playoff games," Edmunds said. "Just the importance of how you take care of yourself on and off the field and the mindset, the preparation, those are the things that take you over the hump, and those are the differences between wins and losses when you get at this point in the season.

"For the guys that haven't been to the playoffs yet, luckily for us, the way that our schedule has been these last couple games we've been playing has been giving them that feeling of what to anticipate as far as how that playoff field is. So, it's not going to be too much of a difference, but obviously you would feel a little bit difference because it's not a guaranteed game after that. But even with all that talk, man, I keep saying over and over again, we have to take care of business this week first and then everything else after that. We worry about it when we get there, but our most important game is most definitely San Francisco.”

The 49ers are in the way of winning top seed or even the NFC North. Getting in was just Step 1.

"Step 2 is we want to win this division; we want to have a at least one home playoff  game," coach Ben Johnson said. "And then Step 3 would be the No. 1 seed. There’s a lot of things still out there to play for. Our guys know that. We talked about it a few weeks ago, just a big picture view of where we stood in relation to the last five games of the season and what we need to accomplish to achieve those goals.

"They get it, not a whole lot needs to be said  about it. Those goals are still out there and we continue pressing forward. Like I said, we're still not necessarily playing at the level that we're capable of yet. That's the beautiful thing about this season, we're all still getting better at what we're doing."

The Bears’ education about winning continues, and that can’t be bad thing for this season or the future.

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Gene Chamberlain
GENE CHAMBERLAIN

Gene Chamberlain has covered the Chicago Bears full time as a beat writer since 1994 and prior to this on a part-time basis for 10 years. He covered the Bears as a beat writer for Suburban Chicago Newspapers, the Daily Southtown, Copley News Service and has been a contributor for the Daily Herald, the Associated Press, Bear Report, CBS Sports.com and The Sporting News. He also has worked a prep sports writer for Tribune Newspapers and Sun-Times newspapers.