I live in suburban Chicago Illinois, which has several benefits. One of the big benefits is that I get to hear overconfident Bears fans on the radio, which I enjoy more than hearing overconfident Green Bay Packers fans on the radio. Don't get me wrong, I'm not at all against proclaiming the superiority of your football team when it's warranted, but when I listen to Wisconsin sports radio the, ahem, "quality" of callers praising the team often has me questioning whether the Packers are actually any good at all. Here in Chicagoland, it works in reverse.
The vast, vast majority of the city is convinced of three things:
Caleb is DEFINITELY the man. It. The promised one. And at the very least, he is superior to Jordan Love.
The Bears are legitimate Super Bowl contenders, and possibly at the beginning of a dynasty.
No other team in the division is even close.
These all seem…how to put this delicately…"not true." Or, less delicately, "delusional." The Bears had a very good, very fun season in 2025, but I spend most of my time writing about luck and regression to the mean and the like, and let me tell you, if the Packers were coming off of the season that the Bears just had, I would be in full fledged panic mode. I already have a bit of a reputation as a Debbie Downer and if the Packers and Bears switched places I'd reach new levels of doomsaying. I would be researching top five picks in the 2027 draft already. I mean, if we had a first-round pick in that draft, I would be doing that, in this alternate universe which we are thankfully not in.
It's important to perform this mental exercise to ensure that 1. I'm not just hating on the Bears because I do actually hate them and they're a terrible franchise that's probably moving to Indiana, or 2. because the Brewers are facing the Cubs right now and I'm taking out my frustration at Cubs fans continually chanting " Green Bay Sucks " in between cheering for shallow flyouts they really thought were going to be home runs.
Fortunately, you don't have to take my word for it. We have neutral arbiters we can turn to for these questions, namely casinos! The team with the best betting odds to win the division isn't the Bears, it's the Lions, who sit at +145 at Fanduel. The Bears are also not second, falling short of the Packers (+160). They're a comfortable third (+350), just ahead of the Vikings (+460). The venerable football analytics website FTN.com also projects the Bears for 9 wins and third place in the division behind the Lions (10.5 wins) and Packers (9.5), and just one game ahead of the Vikings (8).
People wagering actual money or doing advanced math all kind of hate the Bears, and rightfully so. I've read plenty of offseason pieces poking holes in the Packers' roster, but only a few on the Bears, so allow me to poke away.
First, the Bears were super lucky last year. By Tom Bliss' luck metrics, the Bears were the eighth-luckiest team in football (Minnesota was seventh), gaining basically half a win of Win Percentage Added (WPA) over the course of the season due to events completely outside of their control.
You can also see this in their expected record versus their actual record (9.1-7.9 versus their actual 11-6), and the fact that they were third in the division in point differential, behind the Lions and Packers. Point differential predicts future win totals better than previous win totals predict future win totals (say that five times fast), and so bettors and nerds see the Bears as more of a true nine-win team).
The Bears were also alarmingly lucky on defense. They were 30thin yards per play allowed, they allowed the most explosive passing plays in the league, and they allowed a league-leading 13 passing touchdowns of 20+ yards. They allowed the most rushing yards before contact in the league and the fifth highest explosive run rate. They were terrible at everything that matters. The only reason they were not getting blown out week-in and week-out is turnovers.
Turnovers are not ALL about luck, but the Bears were extremely lucky on fumble recoveries, and while interceptions involve more skill than fumble recoveries do, they managed an incredible 32.4% interception rate on their passes defended, easily leading the league. No other team was a bove 25%, and the league average is closer to 20%.
Finally, the Bears were 26thin the league in DVOA on first and second down, and shot up to ninth best on third and fourth down. FTN , who produced most of these statistics (buy their annual almanac here! ) has tracked this for at least two decades now, and when third down efficiency is vastly better than first and second down efficiency, the team's defense almost always craters the following year, as those high leverage third down plays fall back to average (or worse).
And while the Bears were staging all of those thrilling, but unsustainably lucky comeback wins, the Packers and Lions were getting phenomenally unlucky , ranking 29thand 30thin the Bliss rankings. The Lions were the only team to lose WPA in all four major luck categories, while the Packers experienced a lot of positive fumble luck, while giving it all back (and then some) on opposing field goals and opposing dropped passes. It's one thing to be lucky while your major opponents are basically average. Instead, the Bears benefitted from their own luck, as well as colossal bad luck from their closest rivals.
On offense, I think the Bears have outstanding personnel, especially at the skill positions, but anyone claiming the Caleb Williams is currently better than Jordan Love needs to put down the Malort and take a few deep breaths. Williams did a nice job making big plays, and those comebacks were all thrilling, but over the entire 60 minutes of a game, the man just wasn't very good.
Including the playoffs, Caleb Williams had a worse completion percentage last season than JJ McCarthy, and every other quarterback except Shedeur Sanders. He was just 13thin yards per game (slightly ahead of Jordan Love and the slow-as-molasses Packers) while Jared Goff was 2nd. He was 19thin TD% (Love was 10th, Goff was 6th). Caleb does at least have Love on some of the counting stats, as Love missed two games, and the Packers just don't pass that much, but in the more advance stats, Love was third in Completion Percentage Over Expected (CPOE) to Caleb's 29th(Goff was 12th), and Love was fifth in Adjusted Net Yards per Attempt (ANY/A) to Williams' 11th(Goff was third). Love and Goff have better success rates, passer ratings, and Love even has Williams on Average Depth of Target.
The only place where Williams clearly outperformed the league was in protecting the ball. Williams' 1.2% INT% was truly special and led the league among qualified quarterbacks, but Love and Goff weren't exactly butchers, ranking fifth and sixth respectively. Williams also led the league in fourth quarter comebacks, but it's worth noting that he was one of the reasons they were so frequently behind in the first place.
Now, this is all overly negative on Williams, and I actually like Williams as a prospect and expect he will improve into a truly dangerous quarterback. The fact of the matter is that he can make a lot of throws that other quarterbacks cannot, that I trust he will continue to make big plays a standard part of his game. He really only struggles with short and intermediate throws, and that's a good place to struggle because you CAN coach players to be better on short passes. In fact, Jordan Love has greatly improved in this area over the years. However, as of this moment, Caleb Williams is no better than the third best quarterback in the division.
And that's a lot of question marks. The Bears are due for worse luck, for a huge defensive regression, and they have a quarterback who out-produced his underlying metrics a year ago. The smart money is very much against them repeating as division champions. Maybe the fans down here should tone it down a little.
