Don’t be fooled by the fact the Chicago Bears scored 10 whole points Monday night in a 24-10 loss to the Los Angeles Rams , and don’t be fooled by the fact the Bears remain 5-2 despite that MNF defeat in Los Angeles…

Kelvin Kuo/Associated Press
Don’t be fooled by the fact the Chicago Bears scored 10 whole points Monday night in a 24-10 loss to the Los Angeles Rams, and don’t be fooled by the fact the Bears remain 5-2 despite that MNF defeat in Los Angeles.
The Bears have plenty of talent on defense and a strong enough record approaching midseason to compete for a wild-card spot in an expanded playoff field. But don’t kid yourself about this team.
The Bears are fraudulent, bogus. Chicago’s professional football team is a big, fat phony.
A lot of you likely already felt that way about 5-1 Chicagowell before it produced a grand total of three offensive points, 14 first downs, four third-down conversions and zero touchdowns on two red-zone opportunities in an embarrassing Week 7 loss to the Rams.
But it’s also possible some of you hadn’t had a chance to see just how bad the Bears actually are. This was their second game all season outside of the early Sunday timeslot, and you might have missed a weird Thursday-night victory over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers two weeks ago.
If so, you could have looked at the fact Chicago ranked in the bottom 10 in the NFL in terms of DVOA (defense-adjusted value over average) both through the air and on the ground entering Week 7, according to Football Outsiders. You could have discovered that they entered Monday night averaging just 4.8 yards per play (good for 30th in the NFL) and 29.6 yards per drive (placing them 29th in that category).
You could have Googled quarterback Nick Foles, who replaced bust Mitchell Trubisky in September, and found that he was the league’s seventh-lowest-rated passer, and that only he and Sam Darnold of the New York Jets possessed qualified yards-per-attempt averages below 6.0 prior to Monday’s dud at SoFi Stadium.
And in that process, you might have also discovered that both Foles and Trubisky ranked in the bottom 10 in terms of QBR.
But you really had to see it Monday night in order to properly understand it.
Kelvin Kuo/Associated Press
You had to bear witness to Matt Nagy’s dull, unimaginative, predictable offense humiliating itself on national television drive after drive.
You had to hear the borderline disgust in the voices of ESPN color commentators Brian Griese and Louis Riddick, whoafter the veteran Foles held on to the ball for nearly six seconds and took a sack on a 4th-and-goal with the game essentially on the linehad this to say:
“That play-calling sequence…seemed too easy. It seemed too easy to defend the kind of things that they were putting out there on the football field. You have to come up with something a little bit better.”
Jason Lieser@JasonLieserBrian Griese just said that Nick Foles told the ESPN crew that sometimes Nagy sends in a play call and Foles already knows it won’t work because he won’t have enough time after the snap. That’s something.
In Foles’ defense, his offensive line has become a joke, his running game offers almost no support without Tarik Cohen and with Nagy’s failure to get the most out of David Montgomery and Cordarrelle Patterson, and the Bears lack depth beyond Allen Robinson II at wide receiver.
They miss the injured Cohen as well as guard James Daniels, who suffered a season-ending pectoral injury earlier this month, but an offense relying on Germain Ifedi to suddenly become a reliable NFL player was in poor shape even when Daniels and Cohen were on the field.
NFL Research@NFLResearchThe Bears rushed for 49 yards on MNF tonight.
This was the Bears’ 4th consecutive game with fewer than 65 rush yards … the only time they have had 4 straight such games in the Super Bowl era
In the first six weeks of the season, Foles and Trubisky both completed fewer than 50 percent of their third-down pass attempts and red-zone throws. Both had sub-85 passer ratings in the fourth quarter of one-score games. And among 31 quarterbacks who had attempted at least 20 deep passes, they ranked 27th and 28th, respectively, with deep passer ratings of 50.4 and 49.4.
That was before Foles completed just three such passes on 12 attempts on Monday night, with two of the nine incompletions resulting in interceptions.
The Bears are now one of just six teams averaging fewer than 20.0 points per game, but their 19.7 average is inflated by Monday’s defensive touchdown from safety Eddie Jackson, as well as the fact that opportunistic defense has set them up with the fifth-best average drive start position in the NFL.
That D is part of the equation and deserves a lot of credit. It kept Chicago in this game and is the main reason the Bears led the NFC North prior to Week 7. Khalil Mack and Akiem Hicks can hijack games, and without heroic efforts from that unit they probably don’t come back to beat the Detroit Lions and Atlanta Falcons by four points each, they probably don’t edge the Bucs by a score of 20-19 and they might not even beat the New York Giants and Carolina Panthers by an average of five points.
Do the math there and you’ll realize the Bears have actually allowed more points than they’ve scored this season.
It’s 2020. No matter how good your defense isand on paper, this still is by no means a legendary Dyou can’t make a Super Bowl run without at least a half-decent offense.
In fact, a team with a bottom-10 scoring offense has never won a Super Bowl. And if you’re the Bears and you’ve invested $73.6 million per year into five core defensive players (Mack, Hicks, Jackson, Robert Quinn and Eddie Goldman) it’s gotta be Super Bowl or bust.
This team will become older and more expensive as those contracts age, which could leave the front office in handcuffs with regard to the offense for years to come.
That’s the hole the Bears appear to have dug for themselves. Their record might indicate otherwise, but they haven’t fooled many of us this year and they tricked nobody on Monday night. They’re a pretender, and that’s unlikely to change anytime soon.
Brad Gagnon has covered the NFL for Bleacher Report since 2012. Follow him on Twitter: @Brad_Gagnon.