Why Bears Could Quickly Make the Super Bowl

There is the tendency to look at Joe Burrow and the Cincinnati Bengals, at what they have done in his two seasons, and think how something similar is possible for the Bears.

To be sure, the Bears have a big rebuilding project ahead, but it doesn't need to take long and Cincinnati is a perfect example. After all, they gutted the Bengals roster and what had been left over from a Marvin Lewis era that ran far too long, then pulled it together in three years.

The Buffalo Bills or the Cleveland Browns were where the smart money went on a team to replace the Kansas City Chiefs representing the AFC at the Super Bowl. Instead it's a team thought to be two or three years away.

The Bengals were a young team with a quarterback who was coming off an ACL tear. They didn't even have a good offensive line and really still don't, or at least they have one lacking consistency. Evidence: Nine sacks of Joe Burrow in the AFC divisional playoffs against the Tennessee Titans.

Nine sacks should get you a 26-6 loss in Week 3 to the Cleveland Browns, not a berth in the AFC championship game. It should get your head coach to give up calling plays. Just ask Justin Fields.

This is a Bengals team that lost to the Bears in Week 2 and wasn't even really close to winning it. The Bears took it away from Burrow on three successive plays and led 20-3 before Cincinnati's two late touchdowns made it necessary for David Montgomery to kill the clock.

There are reasons to doubt the Bears could make such a rapid transition, the main one simply being their history of disappointment. And the Bengals have a better record for success? The McCaskey family might seem clueless running the team but Mike Brown in Cincinnati was being hung in effigy regularly until very recently.

An aging defense and lack of star receivers make this all seem difficult for the Bears.

In this NFL it's not.

Here's why the Bears could wind up like Cincinnati in three years, if not two years. The task before the Bears looks difficult, but in this NFL the difficult takes less time to accomplish than in years past.

1. The Quarterback

The Bengals had to wait a year for their quarterback, then had to endure a torn ACL in Year 2. Fields is already in place, and the few spectacular plays he achieved in 2021 at least indicated what he could do if given enough coaching to let him achieve a level of consistency. Fields might not have the Burrow ability to read secondaries and pinpoint the ball on receivers but then again, as much as Burrow can move around and make plays he will never be able to do it on a level Fields can. It's developing as a passer next for Fields, who gave glimpses of it as a rookie like against Pittsburgh, but then had his momentum disrupted by injuries. If it turns out Fields isn't the answer and doesn't show improvement over his first year in the offense, the Bears will have a first-round pick in 2023 and expect it to be a quarterback. Ryan Poles is not married to this quarterback like Ryan Pace was.

2. The Defense

There are still key parts of the Bears defense young enough to be part of what they build going forward. Cincinnati's defense during 2020 in its second year under Zac Taylor was 26th on defense, 22nd in scoring and 29th at stopping the run. They gave up more yards per attempt in the passing game than all but one other team. Suddenly this year in Year 3 they were fifth against the run and 18th overall. The turnaround has been a huge part of their success but they have only three starters on defense from the defense they had opening day of 2019 when Taylor took over. The point here is the Bears do not need to get rid of as many starters and they have a totally different system being put in place. But both edge rushers and even third edge rusher Trevis Gipson are familiar with the new defensive assignments, they have Roquan Smith, Jaylon Johnson and it's possible they could even salvage something out of Eddie Jackson but digging somewhere into his past from before he got paid so much. Even Bilal Nichols could fit into that new defense if they signed him back.

3. The Competition

Calling the Packers in decline is jumping the gun but if Aaron Rodgers leaves it will happen immediately. Besides that, Green Bay's salary cap situation is going to result in some defensive loss even if they manage to restructure contracts from now until opening day. When a team has been at the top of a division for as long as the Packers, regression is not only possible but expected. No one in the division looks capable of assuming the leader role other than the Packers but it can happen so quickly. Minnesota still has Kirk Cousins as quarterback and a new coaching staff. They're in much the same situation as the Bears except with fewer viable defensive pieces and more offensive pieces. It's hard to say the Lions have progressed when there have been so few wins and they had so far to go, but then again people said that about the Bengals in 2020. So the ceiling will come down a bit in the NFC North and if the Bears put together the right mix there is opportunity to ascend quickly.

4. The Offensive Approach

It's the popular, cutting-edge wide zone for the running game and offensive coordinator Luke Getsy comes with a better understanding of what makes for an effective passing game than Matt Nagy, who arrived bearing the Kansas City/Andy Reid offense and said: "bow down before it."

Getsy already seems on the right track by talking about molding the attack to the personnel. Nagy never talked about fitting the personnel until Year 4, and by then it was too late. It was: "get me really fast receivers like Tyreek Hill," or "get me a quarterback who throws deep like Patrick Mahomes," or "get me a running back who is like Kareem Hunt and not Jordan Howard." Then the system will work. Instead, Getsy is saying they'll teach the offensive concepts and form plays around the existing talent. The players are the system. It's more flexible and allows for an offense to evolve going forward. How did Nagy's offense evolve? After about eight games the league figured out what they were doing and then it was 3 1/2 seasons of tires spinning in the mud.

5. The Defensive Approach

Not that the Vic Fangio system is bad, or Sean Desai didn't know how to coach it, but the Bears had essentially been doing the same thing since 2015. Chuck Pagano used his own version of it but it was still the 3-4 with two-gap linemen, little blitzing and disguised zone coverages, except with a little less disguise and more of Jackson playing up near the line than he should have been doing. When a team uses the same defensive approach for so long, it's likely teams in their own division figure it out. This is especially the case when one team has a quarterback very adept at seeing what defenses are doing anyway, like Aaron Rodgers. The Bears defense needs to quickly adopt the Sheryl Crow principle and decide change will do them good. Having Eberflus, who put in 4-3 defenses in the past and had almost immediate success doing it with the Colts, can make for a quicker transition than the Bengals had as they reworked their defense.

It's looks like a true rebuild for the Bears, but a rebuild in the NFL takes very little time these days and the Bengals are the perfect example.

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