The Five Must-Haves For A Super Bowl Champion: Where The Chicago Bears Stand

Everybody inside Halas Hall has made it clear throughout this offseason that there is only one goal for the Chicago Bears. It isn’t a winning record. It isn’t a division title. Winning the Super Bowl is all that matters. Anything else would be a failure. That is why head coach Ben Johnson treated the 2025 season as a disappointment. As magical and thrilling a ride as it was, the end result wasn’t what he or anybody else wanted. That is why the 2026 Bears are starting from scratch.

This organization has been chasing that elusive second Lombardi trophy for over 40 years now. They’ve come close a couple of times, but things never quite lined up. That was because they didn’t meet one or two of the critical requirements that make a Super Bowl champion. After doing research, I’ve concluded that there are five essential categories that lead to this outcome in today’s NFL. Let’s dig into how many this Bears team meets, and which ones might be holding them back.

How many Super Bowl boxes do these Chicago Bears check?

1. A Top 10 NFL passer

In today’s league, there is no denying the facts. If you want to compete for championships, you must be able to throw the football. That means putting up passing yards and/or touchdowns. The era of winning with great defense and running the ball is well and truly dead. Looking back over recent history, you’ll find that the vast majority of Super Bowl-winning quarterbacks finished in the top 10 in passing yards or touchdowns or both. It has happened in 12 of the last 15 seasons. The only times it didn’t were Nick Foles in 2017, Peyton Manning in 2015, and Joe Flacco in 2012.

The Chicago Bears: Pass. Caleb Williams checked both boxes last season, as it turns out. He finished 7th in passing yards with 3,941 and 6th in touchdown passes with 27. If he can stay in that window moving forward, the Bears will be in a great spot to continue competing for championships. It certainly isn’t something previous quarterbacks have offered this team. Only Jay Cutler came remotely close, and he often coupled all the numbers with lots of interceptions. Williams manages to get there without too many mistakes.

2. A Top 5 head coach

Of the four major American sports, head coaches matter by far the most in the NFL. Not only must they be leaders of men, but also strategists, tacticians, and, quite often, actual play callers on offense or defense. You’ll often find that okay or even good head coaches aren’t enough. They must be really good or great if you want to win a championship in this league. Looking back over the past 15 years, 11 different head coaches have won the Super Bowl.

Two of them, Bill Belichick and Andy Reid, are no doubt Hall of Famers. Sean McVay, Pete Carroll, and Tom Coughlin are probably getting in as well. A strong case can be made for Bruce Arians, too. There was no question that each of them was a top 5 coach in the league. John Harbaugh and Mike MacDonald also have arguments. Only Gary Kubiak and Doug Pederson are fringe cases.

The Bears: Pass. This one is tough. Ben Johnson has only coached for one year in the league. Determining whether he’s one of the five best in football off of that is challenging. Still, considering the Bears were 5-12 the year before he arrived, and he took them to 11-6 with a top 10 offense that he personally directed? That at least puts him in the conversation. We’ll see if he can sustain that momentum in his second season. Doing so would certainly strengthen his case.

3. A turnover differential of +7 or better

Ask any coach or executive inside the league what determines the fate of games the most, and a healthy portion of them will utter the same word: turnovers. Nothing swings the momentum faster than an interception or a recovered fumble. They can derail scoring threats and put your offense in advantageous scoring positions. By that same token, teams that give the ball away a lot tend to find themselves losing more often than not. The trick is maintaining a healthy gap between the two. You need more takeaways than giveaways. Based on recent metrics, the bar one needs to clear is +7. Ten of the last 15 champions did so.

The Bears: Pass. They owned this category in 2025, finishing with a whopping +22 turnover differential. The offense was effective at minimizing its mistakes, while the defense led the league with 30 takeaways. It is a big reason why the Bears made the playoffs and beat Green Bay in the wild card round. Unfortunately, those three interceptions against the Rams proved to be a killer. Maintaining this efficiency from year to year is difficult, so it will be interesting to see if they can do it again.

4. A Top 7 pass rush

The modern game of football rests on two pillars of truth. The best teams are those who can protect the quarterback and those who can get after the quarterback. Interestingly, the latter appears far more important than the former. Quite a few teams with average-to-below-average offensive lines have won the Super Bowl in the past several years. The same can’t be said for teams with average-to-below-average pass rushes. Of the past 15 champions, only five ranked outside the top seven in defensive pressure rate. Three of them involved Tom Brady.

The Bears: Fail. This one is pretty glaring for them. For all the takeaways they managed, it was done without much help from the pass rush. Chicago finished just 28th in the league in pressure rate, harassing quarterbacks at just a 28.9% clip. Meanwhile, the Rams, whom they lost to in the playoffs, were 5th. That team just spent multiple 1st round picks getting even better with Myles Garrett. The Chicago Bears? They insisted they should be fine with Montez Sweat, Austin Booker, and a returning Dayo Odeyingbo.

5. A +100 point differential

The other part of winning football is simple: the offense must score more points than the opponent, and the defense must stop them from scoring. The trick is getting both to do that job at the same time. Teams that do often have a high point differential. This means they scored a lot more points than they gave up. When looking at the trend of the past 15 seasons, the threshold that most have to break is +100. Ten teams have done so. Another (the Rams in 2021) was +88. Three others were at least +50, and they all had elite defenses.

The Chicago Bears: Fail. While the 2025 team was must-see television, they weren’t the most proficient on both sides of the ball. They finished with a +26 point differential, with most of the heavy lifting coming on the offensive side of the ball. Only five teams have managed to hit that mark in the past 25 years. You can probably guess which ones.

• 2001: +108
• 2005: +128
• 2006: +138
• 2012: +108
• 2018: +149

This only reinforces how much of a missed opportunity that 2018 was. Sadly, they didn’t have the quarterback or head coach to get there. Good news? This team does. They also excel in the turnover differential. What they must find is a better pass rush and stiffer scoring defense. Until that happens, their chances of going all the way remain unlikely.