Will Bears thrive or fold under weight of expectations they've created?
See, this is what happens when you start to win or winning starts happening to you.
That insane and character-exposing killjoy called “expectation” pays you a visit — and often never leaves. Like Ralph Kramden’s mother-in-law: “Like the last time she came for a short visit, just for the holidays, Christmas and New Year’s. The only trouble is she came New Year’s and stayed ’til Christmas!”
Expectations have no rules, no guideline, no sense of when they’re unwelcome or have overstayed their welcome. So once the Bears found themselves pulling out unexpected win after unexpected win and looking down at every other team in the NFC North this deep into the season, guess who came for Thanksgiving dinner?
And guess who’s in the recliner in the front room after the Bears’ Black Friday win over the Eagles?
Expectations have now assumed their happy place in this new Bears orbit.
Even with the lowest percentage of any of the top seven teams in the NFC to make the playoffs entering Friday, according to NFL.com. (At 8-3 and tied for the second-best record in the conference, the Bears had a 59% chance of making playoffs, behind the Packers at 8-3-1 and the Lions at 7-5.) Even with Green Bay beating Detroit on Thursday, the Bears have a “new” expectation beyond anything those percentages can claim to reduce the league’s Next Gen Stats playoff probability analytics to just shear hating.
It’s now expected of them to win games they actually had no business winning, for them to miraculously pull out wins in all close games. To overachieve while still not game-to-game reaching their full potential. The exception now is that they’ve officially entered the NFC North conversation — for good. At worst, finish second in the division. That these Bears won’t fold under any situation, in any game, against any opponent. That luck, at least for the remainder of this season, if only to balance out the opposite of luck that was their last season, is going to side with the Bears.
Expectations that what Joe Thuney, Darnell Wright, Kevin Byard III and Montez Sweat have been doing of late is the unwavering, unchanging, depended-upon norm this day forward. Expectations of Caleb Williams’ clutch gene. Expectations of once Jaylon Johnson, Tremaine Edmunds, T.J. Edwards all return. Expectations of remaining top-five in sacks allowed and in the league lead in takeaways. Expectations that there won’t be any “must-win” games until 2026.
Just as it’s expected now that no team will ever put up 52 on them the way the Lions did earlier and that they’ll never lose a game even close to that margin again this season. But also that something “weird” is going to happen in the final three minutes of the fourth quarter of games, and that weird is going to favor the Bears.
Or, as put by ESPN 1000’s Peggy Kusinski when I asked her about this newfound realm of expectations that has attached itself to the Bears: “Ben Johnson doesn’t want to look out the side view or rearview mirrors, but rather just out the windshield — what’s in front of you. Well, Bears fans are looking through the windshields of every car stuck in traffic ahead of you, and they are seeing playoffs! I am cautious that my ‘navigation system’ (aka Johnson) will take me to where we want to go, but I keep thinking, ‘He’s a man; they never stop to ask for directions,” and it might take awhile longer to get there!’ ”
Metaphorically perfect. Hope always precedes expectations, and basically the Bears have expedited these existing expectations by a year.
A Psychology Today article in 2018 titled “The Psychology of Expectations” stated that “human beings have a natural tendency to pin their hopes for happiness on fulfilled expectations.” At any point past Week 8 being atop the NFC North elevated a “hope for happiness” throughout these 773/312/708-shared area codes that can probably only be matched by one other NFL team in one other NFL area. And that’s the Patriots of New England, unexpected owners of the best record in the league.
But their new expectations aren’t rooted in the urgency and desperation of ours. Six Super Bowl trophies since our single one shifts the weight of how expectations are applied when the thirst-trap gap is seven years (2019) to 40 years (1986).
The Bears, if nothing else, have earned all expectations now chasing them. Expectations that have been waiting for the invite to ring the door bell. Now all the Bears have to do is embrace the chase and play host to an overdue welcomed visitor. Own the expectations they unexpectedly earned. Then again, Linus once told his best friend, “Keep your expectations low, Charlie Brown.”
And Charlie Brown’s first metaphoric enemy was a football.