Every year the NFL Network has a special episode dedicated to predicting the records for each team that season. The Chicago Bears record prediction has finally arrived. How did they do? Well things must be prefaced by noting that Heath Evans and Elliot Harrison were the men making the picks. Both have histories of being notoriously hard on the Bears.
Harrison ranked the Bears as the 29th team in the league after the NFL draft, almost making fun of Ryan Pace for his rationale when drafting Mitch Trubisky and Tarik Cohen. Evans was even worse, slamming the Bears for the Trubisky selection and stating he’d likely never resemble anything like an NFL starting QB.
So again, these are the two guys deciding the 2017 record for Chicago. You can pretty much guess what happens next.
Chicago Bears record prediction has a whiff of 2015
It’s no secret that everybody views the start of the Bears’ season as a lost cause. They’re playing four teams who had a winning record in 2016 right out of the gate. Three of those teams played in conference championship games. That is a brutal first month. So it’s not fair to criticize Evans for giving them four-straight losses. Given where the Bears are at in their development, it’s a real possibility.
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Where things went off the rails came later on. Winning five of their next seven games was a pretty fair move including three-straight in the division. However, that good will went out the window when Harrison inexplicably gave them five-straight losses to end the year. This includes dropping games to teams like the 49ers and Browns. Both of whom had worse records than the Bears in 2016.
This is where their anti-Chicago bias most definitely seeps in. For the Bears to not get at least one of those two games and a second amidst the Bengals, Lions and Vikings matchups? That’s as pessimistic as it gets.
Still, that’s the final tally. The Bears will finish 5-11 in 2017. In all likelihood that means John Fox gets fired and the coaching staff changes. Here’s hoping that, like almost every year, they’re wrong.
