Bear Digest

Revisiting Chicago Bears Biggest 'What If' of the 2024 Season

Without the Hail Mary pass where would the Bears be now? It's easy to see its impact when they haven't won since it happened but what would the record be without that loss?

Gene Chamberlain

Austin Ekeler celebrates as the Bears can only look on with disgust after the Hail Mary decided a Washington 18-15 win.
Austin Ekeler celebrates as the Bears can only look on with disgust after the Hail Mary decided a Washington 18-15 win. / Geoff Burke-Imagn Images
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With one week to go and a meaningless game against Green Bay at that, it's easy to look back over the wreckage of a Bears season laying upon the 2024 landscape with its very distinct defining points.

Some teams go through and win a few, lose a few and arrive at season's end just out of the playoffs or perhaps a part of the playoff picture.

The Bears' season, instead, resembles a person running along at a good pace and ... that's it, a bottomless pit and they've fallen in it.

It all happened literally in a few split seconds and that team vanished, leaving only a hollowed out shell of what the 2024 season could have been.

They had opportunities after the turning point occurred and never took advantage. They simply kept falling.

The Turning Point

Players still admit the Hail Mary was a turning point but like Kevin Byard said two weeks ago, he doesn't still sit around thinking about it.

You don't need to think about a moment like this to have it leave a burning scar in the psyche. It really seems to have done this.

Tyrique Stevenson led the cheers with fans as the play unfolded, but there was much more to the Hail Mary than Stevenson suddenly realizing he needed to get involved in a play that was rushing toward him before wildly rushing into the crowd and tipping the ball back to the end zone for Noah Brown caught it because the person who was supposed to cover him wasn't there—and that person was Stevenson.

The Bears went from 4-2, on top of the world and a few seconds from 5-2 after a fourth-quarter comeback Caleb Williams had engineered, to 4-3 and knowing the second half of their schedule would be loaded with potential disaster. It was.

The first part of the Hail Mary was Matt Eberflus' bad mistake in not guarding the sidelines and letting the Commanders get into position where Jayden Daniels could throw the long pass. It was at the 35 after an 11-yard pass to Zach Ertz and the final Washington timeout.

Throwing a 65-yard pass accurately under any kind of pressure is just not happening. The Commanders had only one way to get it closer and that was complete a pass that went out of bounds.

And Eberflus didn't put extra defenders on the sideline like other coaches have done in that situation. Terry McLaurin was able to catch it, get it out of bounds and set up a much more realistic scenario for a 52-yard Hail Mary.

This was Point 1 where the entire season could have taken a different tone. If he puts extra DBs in and guards the sideline, there is no way to stop the clock in time for a Hail Mary attempt.

On the Hail Mary, they didn't really apply serious pressure by rushing three men and putting linebacker T.J Edwards in short coverage on a running back. There was no point to any of it.

Several teams in similar situations simply blitzed and made sure the Hail Mary couldn't come off. The Rams did it against the 49ers on a Brock Purdy Hail Mary attempt and he never got to set up for the throw. He was sacked.

Then the situation with Stevenson not getting involved on the play might have been avoided if Eberflus called a timeout prior to the snap to make sure everyone was on board with their role.

If this play never occurred, what would have happened to the 2024 Bears?

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The Aftermath

It's been 10 games of losing since then. If that Hail Mary hadn't occurred and the Bears had gone 5-2, here's what might have happened.

First, Matt Eberflus might still be Bears coach. Do they then lose every game until Thanksgiving and then he's fired? It's very unlikely this would have happened. They obviously were mentally out of it for two weeks after the loss, losing at home to the Patriots in a blowout of all things, after they got trampled by Arizona. Afterward, they awoke and took the Packers to the last second.

If they had won the Washington game, it's difficult to imagine them coming in so flat at Arizona and definitely if they had lost they would have been a bit more frantic in their effort to bounce back against New England.

Second, they might be a team fighting for a playoff spot. If they come out of that stretch 7-2, the question is whether they would have had the blocked field goal on the past play with the Packers. Would they have lost on Thanksgiving to Detroit in the stupid manner they did?

At 9-7, they definitely have the coaching staff intact and possibly are in a wild card chase because Washington would have one less win and one more loss.

What's more likely based on what has become apparent about their team makeup is they would have simply been a 7-9 team or 6-10 team going into this week's game. They don't have the overall depth of talent the Vikings, Packers and Lions have.

They lack the well-functioning offensive systems of those teams and they played six games against those teams. The second Lions game was proof of this.

They lost the game convincingly to the Cardinals and if they hadn't been dead on arrival against New England and had won, they still would have been 6-3 going into a stretch of games against some of the league's better teams.

The blocked field goal with the Packers had nothing to do with their Hail Mary pass. They simply didn't block for the kick. They lost the Minnesota game in overtime and really had no business winning it anyway because they became very fortunate in recovering the onside kick to tie it. The Thanksgiving Day loss was only a drive to try to get in range for the tying field goal. They could have lost that game in overtime just like against Minnesota.

They were entirely overmatched against San Francisco and in their second game with Detroit, and this was a Lions team with six or seven missing starters.

The Bottom Line

The Bears had the receivers but a rookie quarterback was going to be a problem anyway. They didn't have a running game anyone feared all year. Eventually it put too much pressure on their defense resulting in a collapse over several games until bouncing back against Seattle.

The Bears had numerous problems exposed over the course of a second-half schedule loaded with talented teams. Hail Mary or not, they would have eventually been exposed by those better teams and would have topped out at seven or eight wins instead of four like they have now.

With four, they have a different future ahead without the same coaching staff.

Is this a bad thing for their future? It definitely has been bad for the Eberflus regime but if they had so many issues that were exposed by better teams, perhaps it's for the best they'll have a different coaching staff going forward. Someone with a better concept of time and football strategy might come in now.

Maybe they'll be able to look back in the future at the Hail Mary and say that it was a turning point toward something better, toward a winning coach and team, rather than merely the turning point toward a seventh last-place finish in 11 seasons.

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Gene Chamberlain
GENE CHAMBERLAIN

BearDigest.com publisher Gene Chamberlain has covered the Chicago Bears full time as a beat writer since 1994 and prior to this on a part-time basis for 10 years. He covered the Bears as a beat writer for Suburban Chicago Newspapers, the Daily Southtown, Copley News Service and has been a contributor for the Daily Herald, the Associated Press, Bear Report, CBS Sports.com and The Sporting News. He also has worked a prep sports writer for Tribune Newspapers and Sun-Times newspapers.