The double whammy working against 2025 Bears miracle Super Bowl run
The Bears just finished a five-win season on the heels of three other losing regular seasons in succession. With Johnson coming in as a first-time head coach, it appears the Bears are unlikely candidates for some sort of miraculous run to a division title or—dare anyone say it or really even think it—Super Bowl.
However, there is always hope in this league where parity exists and always has since the institution of the draft in 1936.
Jauron’s 2001 team posted his only winning season and the Bears did a total reversal from five wins in 2000 to 13-3 and an NFC Central title. They even won the first two regular season games of 2002, the year they had to play in Champaign while the current Soldier Field was constructed.
Then their 15-3 regular-season run turned into a total collapse to 4-12 2002 amid a string of untimely injuries and their usual quarterback issues.
Still, it shows such things are possible. Going from five wins to the Super Bowl seems like a much bigger stretch of the imagination, but again, it’s not impossible.
That sort of thing was done by the 1988 and 2021 Bengals, 2009 Saints, 2017 Eagles, 1999 Rams and 2001 Patriots.
The double whammy
The theoretical problem facing the Bears in trying to go from 5-12 to the Super Bowl is the double whammy they face.
It involves inexperience and that most intimate of all football relationships, the coach and the quarterback.
There has never been a rookie quarterback start a Super Bowl. The Bears will have a second-year QB in 2025 but there has been only a very limiited number of those who started a Super Bowl.
Kurt Warner did it when the Rams won it all in1999, his actual second season in the league but first starting. As an aside, Warner was originally signed by the 1994 Packers, who already had young starter Brett Favre. Talk about a team with good QB fortune. They could simply discard Warner from the roster because of all their QB riches.
George Seifert (49ers, 1989,) and Don McCafferty (Colts, 1970) were the only ones to win it all in their first year as first-time head coaches, but Red Miller (Broncos, 1977), Jim Caldwell (Colt, 2009) and Bill Callahan (Raiders, 2002) made it there before losing.
