Bear Digest

The double whammy working against 2025 Bears miracle Super Bowl run

Teams make drastic turnarounds from one season to the next and even miracle turnarounds to reach the Super Bowl but two factors weigh against the Bears doing it in 2025.

Gene Chamberlain

A first-year coach with no head coaching experience and a second-year QB like Caleb Williams is a tough mix to overcome.
A first-year coach with no head coaching experience and a second-year QB like Caleb Williams is a tough mix to overcome. / Daniel Bartel-Imagn Images
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The passing of former Bears coach Dick Jauron brings up a point about his teams applicable to the 2025 Chicago Bears of coach Ben Johnson.

Or at least they have to hope it does.

The Bears just finished a five-win season on the heels of three other losing regular seasons in succession. With Johnson coming in as a first-time head coach, it appears the Bears are unlikely candidates for some sort of miraculous run to a division title or—dare anyone say it or really even think it—Super Bowl.

However, there is always hope in this league where parity exists and always has since the institution of the draft in 1936.

Jauron's 2001 team posted his only winning season and the Bears did a total reversal from five wins in 2000 to 13-3 and an NFC Central title. They even won the first two regular season games of 2002, the year they had to play in Champaign while the current Soldier Field was constructed.

Then their 15-3 regular-season run turned into a total collapse to 4-12 2002 amid a string of untimely injuries and their usual quarterback issues.

Still, it shows such things are possible. Going from five wins to the Super Bowl seems like a much bigger stretch of the imagination, but again, it's not impossible.

That sort of thing was done by the 1988 and 2021 Bengals, 2009 Saints, 2017 Eagles, 1999 Rams and 2001 Patriots.

The double whammy

The theoretical problem facing the Bears in trying to go from 5-12 to the Super Bowl is the double whammy they face.

It involves inexperience and that most intimate of all football relationships, the coach and the quarterback.

There has never been a rookie quarterback start a Super Bowl. The Bears will have a second-year QB in 2025 but there has been only a very limiited number of those who started a Super Bowl.

Kurt Warner did it when the Rams won it all in1999, his actual second season in the league but first starting. As an aside, Warner was originally signed by the 1994 Packers, who already had young starter Brett Favre. Talk about a team with good QB fortune. They could simply discard Warner from the roster because of all their QB riches.

The other QBs who led a team to a Super Bowl win in their second season were the Steelers' Ben Roethlisberger in 2005 and Seattle's Russell Wilson in 2013.  Dan Marino (1984), Colin Kaepernick (2012), Joe Burrow (2021) and Brock Purdy (2023) all got there and lost.

The Bears have another problem working against them and it's Johnson's inexperience.

Coaching baptism by fire

There have been first-time head coaches who got to a Super Bowl their rookie season, like Ben Johnson is going to try to do.

George Seifert (49ers, 1989,) and Don McCafferty (Colts, 1970) were the only ones to win it all in their first year as first-time head coaches, but Red Miller (Broncos, 1977), Jim Caldwell (Colt, 2009) and Bill Callahan (Raiders, 2002) made it there before losing.

However, there has never been a first-year head coach ever make it to a Super Bowl with a second-year quarterback.

Matt Eberflus always talked about time on task. It's real. Experience matters at both positions.

If the Bears are going to make a miracle Super Bowl run in the 2025 season, the odds say it would have to be with a different quarterback than Caleb Williams.

Then again there's a first time for everything, even in the NFL.

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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.