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Aaron Rodgers is gone, but the Bears still failed like always against the Packers.
The Chicago Bears and Green Bay Packers have played more times than any two teams in NFL history, but the state of the rivalry over the last 30 years has been one long exercise in pain tolerance for the one playing its home games south of the Illinois-Wisconsin border. The Bears entered the season with just five wins against the Packers in the last 31 games, two wins in the last 19 games, and zero wins in the last eight games. To continue calling this one of the best rivalries in sports is to acknowledge its rich tradition while ignoring every piece of recent evidence to the contrary. Yet as the two teams met to open the 2023 season, Chicago believed it had real reason for optimism that the franchises’ respective fortunes could finally flip.
Since 1992, the Packers have had two quarterbacks start almost every game, both of them destined for the Hall of Fame. Mercifully, that streak would be broken in Week 1: Aaron Rodgers successfully pushed himself to the New York Jets, Jordan Love took over in his absence, and the Packers at last had the same instability at the most important position in sports that had been plaguing Chicago for a century. If the Bears were ever going to gain the upper hand again, it had to come as Green Bay was turning to a QB with one career pro start and minimal track record of elite play at any level.
The Bears, of course, had nowhere to go but up. Chicago had lost its final 10 games of last season to finish 3-14, which ended up being the worst record in football when the franchise’s last successful head coach, Lovie Smith, somehow engineered a Week 18 comeback win as leader of the Houston Texans. The Bears owned the first pick in the draft, but they didn’t need a quarterback with Justin Fields poised to make a leap in his third year. Instead, the Bears traded back to No. 9, got Fields a true No. 1 wide receiver in D.J. Moore, and drafted a right tackle to protect him. The thought was that with an improved offensive line and receiving corps, the Bears could eliminate the excuses and get a real read on Fields’ ability as a passer after his record-breaking season as a running QB a year ago.
Hope, as it turns out, is a dangerous thing, especially when you’re partial to a franchise as comprehensively pathetic as the Bears have been decade-after-decade.
The Packers beat the Bears, 38-20, in a game that felt a lot more lopsided than that. Green Bay dominated the trenches, converted third downs at a hyper-efficient rate, and again out-performed Chicago in the passing game to leave little doubt about the trajectory of the rivalry even without Rodgers.
The game was an all-inclusive nightmare for the Bears. You can start with the coaching. The offense attempted one brain-dead screen pass after another in an apparent effort to gain more yards going horizontal than vertical. The defense generated nothing in the way of a real pass rush, failed to force a turnover, and played a hyper-conservative style that Love picked apart. Head coach Matt Eberflus called the game a “learning experience,” but the biggest takeaway was Chicago’s lack of preparation and intensity in every phase of the game.
It felt like Fields was destined to be the story of this game win or less, but instead the breakdown of his team was so exhaustive that his meager play only feels like a footnote. The Packers pressured Fields all afternoon, with his newly improved offensive line already showing major cracks in the foundation. The new receivers didn’t help, either: Moore finished with just two catches for 25 yards, while Chase Claypool only got in the box score for a drop. A year ago, Fields had one of the most electric plays of his career by busting the Packers for a 56-yard touchdown run. On Sunday, he ran for only 59 yards all day, failing to generate the big play Chicago needed on another life team-wide effort.
Of course, Fields barely had a chance to show whatever progress he may have made as a passer: the game-plan called almost no vertical shots, instead trying to get Fields to get rid of the ball quickly in the flats. Anyone who has watched Fields since he first emerged as an elite talent out of the Atlanta area could tell you that’s not how to best deploy his skills, and no surprise, it didn’t work at all.
The Packers may be in a new era of quarterback play, but they remain an organization that moves with purpose. Matt LaFleur has proven himself as a sharp head coach, the offensive and defensive lines are always strong, and the team plays a competent style of football even when it has a new QB and barely any healthy wide receivers. Success in pro sports starts at the top and trickles down; Green Bay always has a sensible plan there while the Bears don’t even know if they want to stay in Chicago.
This is the type of loss that makes a person lose faith in the entire operation. How can general manager Ryan Poles be trusted to continue constructing a good football team when he just whiffed with the most cap space in the league? How can anyone have confidence in Eberflus or his two coordinators after such a lethargic effort and poor play-calling? Fields also has plenty of questions to answers going forward, but the dumb penalties, birdbrained schemes, and all-around ineptitude of everyone surrounding him makes you wonder how any QB would ever be successful here.
There have probably been worse Bears games, because every NFL loss can be felt until felt on a visceral level until the next one begins. To see the Bears get smacked by Green Bay like this without Rodgers though is a sobering reminder that even when the names change, but the Bears’ incompetence against the Packers never does.
