Back when NFL scoreboards couldn’t be relied upon to keep time, officials kept a starter’s pistol on the sideline. As the clock wound to zero, an official — starting in 1965, it was line judge — would fire the gun in the air to signify the end of a quarter.
The NFL scrapped the practice at the end of the 1993 season, but the colloquialism — to play until the final gun — lived on. While it’s fair to wonder whether a tanking Bears team did that in Sunday’s 29-13 loss to the Vikings on Sunday, there’s no question that the men running the first 14-loss team in franchise history need to take the concept of the starter’s pistol literally.
When the final gun sounded Sunday, general manager Ryan Poles and head coach Matt Eberflus ran out of excuses. So did quarterback Justin Fields, who should benefit from having more skilled teammates next season. They need to begin running — sprinting — in a race to build a winning team.
The Bears will have the most money in the NFL to spend — and, thanks to a fourth-and-20 Hail Mary by the Texas on Sunday afternoon, the draft’s No. 1 overall pick. They’ll also have a roster that, by design, has more holes than almost any other team in football.
For the first time, they’ll have expectations: to build the Bears into a winner.
Eberflus has spent the season saying that his expectations are the same every week.
“The standard is the standard,” he’s said dozens of times.
Now the standard is changing, even if the coach won’t acknowledge it.
“To me that’s outside the locker room,” he pushed back Sunday. “We can’t control those things, and, again, we’re focused on our standard, how we operate in practice, in the meetings, and in the game.”
Their failures can no longer be met by the cheers of a sliver of the fan base that rooted against the Bears every week with hopes of improving their draft status. They can no longer claim that close losses mean anything. They can longer be judged against the low expectations that they set with their own roster construction.
No one in the Bears’ locker room celebrated a three-win season, draft pick or not. Running back David Montgomery was asked how to define it.
“Unfortunate,” he said. “Just unfortunate. It’s just unfortunate.”
In his first year, what Poles accomplished required all the subtlety of a sledgehammer.
Poles traded the team’s three best defensive players (Roquan Smith, Khalil Mack and Robert Quinn) and paid dearly for the privilege, paying a league-high $93.3 million in dead cap charges. The league average was almost one-third as much.
The one win-now move Poles made — trading his own second-round pick to the Steelers for receiver Chase Claypool — has thus far been a dud. Only one of the one-year flyer free agent contracts he handed out prompted a contract extension — and that was a one-year deal for Equanimeous St. Brown. Cornerback Kyler Gordon and safety Jaquan Brisker were acceptable second-round draft picks, but wouldn’t you rather have Steelers receiver George Pickens?
Tearing the team down required Poles to hold his nose and make a move. Rebuilding requires panache. It’s an exercise in precision and creativity.
Can Poles pull it off? Can Eberflus coach them up?
Eberflus could go 11-6 in his next two seasons and still have a worse winning percentage than Matt Nagy did. Without wins to support his proof of concept, Eberflus spent the season talking about establishing a winning culture and enforcing his H.I.T.S. principle.
“I think one of the main focuses of this year was to build a foundational floor to build up, and I think we did that,” he said. “That’s a credit to those players in that locker room. They did a really good job.”
In that context, maybe. But by no other definition.
That needs to change. Starting now.