January 26, 1986. The day that everybody celebrated in the city of Chicago was also the day that everything came to an abrupt end. Before the New England Patriots became the league’s biggest nightmare in the 2000s, the Chicago Bears were on top of cloud nine. Forget that they absolutely demolished New England 46-10 in the Superdome on the biggest stage in sports. Throughout that whole season, their defense cemented themselves as one of the most dominant units in NFL history and was the biggest reason why they won fifteen games in the regular season, while only giving up ten points in the entire postseason. It would end up being the last game for Buddy Ryan as the defensive coordinator since he would be the head coach for the Philadelphia Eagles the following season, but the Bears gave him the proper send-off that he absolutely deserved. It was also unfortunately the end of the most memorable periods of time for that franchise and that city because ever since then, Chicago has yet to win another Lombardi trophy. In the period that the Patriots have been scratching and clawing their way to the playoffs and championship games, the Bears have been up and down every single year. Either they’re one of the biggest surprise stories that come up short in the playoffs or their flaws force them to have a regular season. Whenever they face off against each other, there will be a couple of blowouts here and then, but the wind in Massachusetts or Illinois always blows their way and forces them to play extremely tight matchups. In 2024, two of the top three picks in the draft will take center stage in a pivotal matchup that could very well determine if Caleb Williams and Drake Maye are the answers that can put their franchises back on the map. Let’s take a look at five of these previous down-to-the-wire matchups to understand just what type of direction the Bears were heading in and how it would affect the Patriots later on down the road.
#1: The Race for a Higher Pick in 2000
Travel back in time to December 10, 2000, and both the Patriots and Bears are near the bottom of the standings in their conferences. New England entered this matchup with a disappointing 4-9 while Chicago was even worse at 3-10, so there was essentially nothing meaningful to play for besides maybe a higher draft pick. Under second-year head coach Dick Jauron, the Chicago Bears just had everything go wrong for them in the 2000 season. They relied on three different quarterbacks, their offense scored the fourth fewest points in the NFL, and their defense mainly relied on their rookie and future Hall of Fame linebacker Brian Urlacher to be the only one to show up. At least for the Patriots, fans could say it was more of an evaluative year than anything. Bill Belichick was in his first year as the head coach and while the 2000 season was easily forgettable and full of losing, it was a chance to see the biggest strengths and weaknesses that he could improve upon in the offseason. They had plenty of notable players from that dynasty on both sides of the ball, but neither of them really hit their peaks at that time. By the time they played each other in Soldier Field, it was a chance for either one of these teams to have some semblance of dignity this late in the season, although nobody else was really going to pay attention.
Drew Bledsoe got the start for the New England Patriots while the Chicago Bears decided to start Shane Matthews, an undrafted quarterback in his second stint with the team after an injury to Jim Miller and an underwhelming stint from Cade McNown. An absolutely awesome quarterback matchup without question. Surprisingly enough, this game turned out to be a lot better than anticipated. The huge positive for both of these teams was that their quarterbacks played exceptionally well. Bledsoe had an efficient 225 yards through the air and a couple of touchdown passes, while Matthews threw for close to 240 on just five incompletions while tossing two scores of his own. It was enough for both teams to head into the locker room tied at halftime, so the indication was that this would come down to the final play of the game. When they came back to the field, both offenses picked up where they left off. The Bears went on a couple of scoring touchdowns to take a 24-10 lead at the start of the fourth quarter, but the Patriots quickly responded to make it a one-score game. From that point on, it became a gutsy defensive struggle, but a missed field goal from Paul Edlinger gave New England extra life in the final minute. On third down and one with seventeen seconds left, Bledsoe found Troy Brown for another first down to give their team a couple more chances to tie up the game, but there was a flag on the play. It turned out that wide receiver Curtis Jackson was called for an illegal motion, which required a ten-second runoff per the NFL rules. Because there were ten seconds left when the play was over, it ended the game and gave the Bears the decisive 24-17 victory.
Both teams ended the week 4-10 after this performance and they also finished the season 5-11, but their draft positions were completely different. The Patriots got the sixth overall pick and used it to select future hall of fame defensive tackle Richard Seymour, who would help the franchise win three of its first Super Bowls as a key contributor and anchor to some of the best defenses that Bill Belichick has ever had in his coaching career. Meanwhile, the Bears got to draft their player of choice two spots later and went with wide receiver David Terrell, who scored just nine touchdowns in the four years that he spent with the team.
#2: Tom Brady’s First Comeback Victory
Let’s fast forward a couple of years later and see if the optics changed for either of these franchises. Well heading into the 2002 season, the Patriots were coming off their first Super Bowl championship thanks to a lights-out defense and a surprise emergence of quarterback Tom Brady, so it’s safe to say that they headed in the right direction. For the Chicago Bears, things were a lot better in 2001. After two losing seasons, Dick Jauron finally turned it around with a 13-3 campaign. Their offense still had inconsistent quarterback play, but their defense was carrying them game after game. The Bears gave up the fewest points, the fewest passing touchdowns, and their run defense was near the league’s elite. Urlacher was still one of the best young linebackers in the game, Rosevelt Colvin had a career-high 10.5 sacks, and Mike Brown had back-to-back games with walk-off pick sixes that signified just how dominant their defense was. Unfortunately, their bounce-back season ended in their first home playoff game since 1991, where they lost to the Philadelphia Eagles 33-19 due to a three-interception and 89-yard combined performance from Shane Matthews and Jim Miller. Normally after a season like that, a team would address those issues in a blink of an eye, but the Bears went into a freefall once again. Heading into their Week 10 game against the Patriots at home, Chicago was 2-6 and right back to where they were in 2000. Even with Cade McNown and Shane Matthews no longer on the team, they still kept Jim Miller around and brought in Chris Chandler to be the backup quarterback. In other words, the Bears didn’t learn that their lack of depth at quarterback was costing this team’s chance at success.
By halftime, both defenses were playing exceptionally well, which is what anybody could expect from both teams at that time. The Patriots under Bill Belichick knew that they were not going to let Jim Miller or Chris Chandler have the game of their lives, while the Bears knew that shutting down Tom Brady was going to be the only way that they would stay in this game. To start the third quarter, Chicago’s defense came up with two huge turnovers and their offense capitalized on them with twenty-one unanswered points, which made this game into a lopsided blowout. However, the legend of Tom Brady as the comeback king in the NFL began on this very day because once he got the ball back, there was no stopping him. Every time that the Patriots touched the ball, they got points on the board. Brady threw for 328 yards and capped off a memorable performance with a go-ahead touchdown pass to David Patten with twenty-eight seconds left in the fourth quarter. After trailing 27-6 in the third quarter, New England went on a 27-3 run to end the game and ripped this game away from the Chicago Bears. What was the biggest reason for this downfall? Once again, the quarterback. While Chris Chandler did get hurt in the middle of the second quarter, Jim Miller completed less than 50% of his passes and threw for just seventy-two yards. Their offense might have scored three touchdowns, but two of them were thanks to defensive takeaways, and the final was a trick play that saw Marty Booker throw a touchdown pass. All New England had to do was not screw up for the rest of the game and they would win, which is exactly what happened.
The Patriots improved to 5-4 with the victory and finished the regular season 9-7, but were eliminated from playoff contention via tiebreaker. Meanwhile, the Bears went 2-7 and only won two more games for the rest of the year. They ended up having two first-round picks in the 2003 NFL Draft and used those to select defensive end Michael Haynes and quarterback Rex Grossman. Haynes only played three seasons for the Bears and had just 5.5 career sacks. Grossman was not that much better of a pick. Even though he was the quarterback that helped Chicago get to the Super Bowl in 2006, it was the only season where he threw more than five touchdown passes during his time with the team. It was also the only year where he started all sixteen games in a season, so the quarterback problems just continued to pile up for this football team.
#3: Potential Super Bowl Preview?
Speaking of 2006, let’s fast forward to this season because this next matchup between the Patriots and Bears was being labeled as a potential Super Bowl preview for media pundits. By November 26, New England had already won three Super Bowl championships and entered this game with an expected 7-3 record. Their offense still had Tom Brady and finished in the top fifteen in a lot of categories including points scored, yards totaled, touchdown passes thrown, fewest interceptions, and rushing touchdowns. Belichick never let this defense regress as it gave up the second-fewest points, sixth-fewest total yards, and fewest touchdown passes, and came up with the fourth-most takeaways out of anybody else. Unsurprisingly, the Patriots were considered to be one of the top teams that would come out of the AFC, but the Chicago Bears were going to be a team that would present many challenges. Once again, the defense was the team’s biggest strength. They allowed the third-fewest points, and fifth-fewest total yards, and led the league in takeaways. However, the offense was starting to turn it around. Rex Grossman had a promising start to the year and posted career highs in plenty of categories. There were still plenty of bumps and flaws such as the amount of turnovers, but this offense scored the second most points in the league and was a heavy run team featuring Thomas Jones and Cedric Benson. Obviously, it wasn’t the healthiest formula to winning football games in theory, but they entered Gillette Stadium 9-1, so they were clearly the best team in the NFC. By the time they had to see the Patriots, they had only given up more than twenty-five points once, which was in their only defeat against the Miami Dolphins. Defense was going to be the name of the game, but the presence of Tom Brady made New England a 3.5-point favorite at home, so it was up to Rex Grossman to play at his best and shock the world.
This ended up being one of the sloppiest games of the entire season because not only did both offenses score under ten points, but they combined for nine turnovers. Every time that it looked like one of these teams was going to go down the field and get in the end zone, they would cough up the ball and give it right back to the opposition. Tied at ten early in the fourth quarter, it was anybody’s ball game. This might not have been a momentum-shifting play, but on New England’s first drive of the period, Brady gave the team a bit of a spark on a quarterback scramble in which he juked past Brian Urlacher and got an extra set of downs. That run got New England into the red zone, and a few plays later, he threw a go-ahead touchdown pass to Benjamin Watson with close to eight minutes left. Now it was up to Grossman to decide how this game was going to end. Will he shut up the critics and will his team to victory? Or will he revert back to his early struggles between 2003 and 2005 and cost the Bears the game? Two drives would give us the answer. On the first one, he got Chicago into the red zone, but the drive stalled out and they were forced to settle for a field goal that cut the deficit to four. Grossman got another chance after a huge fumble recovery from Alex Brown gave the Bears more life. With no timeouts and 1:52 remaining, he had plenty of time to drive down the field and win the game. But on his first pass of the drive, he decided to go with the home-run ball to Rashied Davis in the middle of the field, and it came back to bite him because it got intercepted by Asante Samuel to give New England the victory. It was the third interception thrown by Grossman that day and it capped off a performance where he completed less than 50% of his passes on a day where they had several chances to take the lead and win the game. Brady might have thrown two interceptions of his own, but he did enough in the end and made plenty of key plays to give his team the win, whereas Rex Grossman completely failed in the clutch. The Patriots escaped with a 17-13 victory, and if they were to see each other again in the playoffs, they both would have had completely different game plans.
The Chicago Bears finished the 2006 season with the number one record in the NFC at 13-3, beat the Seattle Seahawks in overtime in their first playoff game, and then dismantled the New Orleans Saints 39-14 in the NFC Championship to advance to their first Super Bowl since 1985. The Patriots ended the regular season 12-4 and had the fourth seed in the AFC race, but that did not distract the team from its ultimate prize. They started the postseason with a blowout Wild Card victory against their inferior division rival New York Jets 37-16 and followed it with an “upset” victory against the number one seed San Diego Chargers 24-21. Leading 21-3 in the conference championship against Peyton Manning and the Indianapolis Colts, it looked like New England would see the Bears once again in the Super Bowl, but fate had a different plan. The Patriots unfortunately gave up the lead and lost to the Colts 38-34 on the road, and a couple weeks later, the Chicago Bears would also suffer heartbreak against this team in Miami 29-17. If the Patriots had not blown that lead in the conference championship game, they could have potentially won their fourth Super Bowl in six seasons, an unprecedented accomplishment. However, it would be a long time before New England came back on top.
#4: One Yard Short
After that spectacular performance in 2006, the Patriots and Bears would see each other a couple more times between 2007 and 2017, but New England ended up blowing their opponent out in both contests. One of those games took place in 2010, when Chicago went back to the NFC Championship game with another chance of reaching the Super Bowl but lost to their division rival Green Bay Packers that ended up winning the whole thing two weeks later. By the time they saw each other again in 2018, New England still asserted itself as the league’s elite, while the Bears were in the process of a very long rebuild. Under first-year head coach Matt Nagy, it was up to him to get this offense back in the right direction, but mainly develop second-overall pick Mitchell Trubisky into a quality starting NFL quarterback. Well, that was exactly what happened. Even though the numbers might not be the most inspiring, Trubisky ended up making the Pro Bowl that season, and Chicago had one of the top ten rushing offenses in the league. He had plenty of help around him such as Jordan Howard, Tarik Cohen, Allen Robinson, and even Trey Burton who helped this offense completely 360 into a respectable unit. However, what really put the Bears back on the map was their lights-out defense. There were inklings that they could be something special after finishing in the top ten in both points and yards allowed, but a lackluster offense and a 5-11 record held them back from their true potential. However, in that 2018 offseason, they made a blockbuster trade and acquired edge rusher Khalil Mack to solidify their defensive front. The rest was history. The Bears finished that 2018 season with 50 sacks, third in the National Football League, and 12.5 of them came from Mack himself. That defense also finished the season giving up the fewest points, third-fewest yards, fewest rushing yards, and touchdowns, and leading the league in takeaways. When they welcomed the Patriots in the seventh week of the season, the Bears were hoping to get the respect that they felt they deserved, but New England was always Super Bowl favorites for a reason. By the time the 2018 season began, they had won two more championships and were just coming off a heartbreaking 41-33 defeat to the Philadelphia Eagles on that same stages, a game where Tom Brady threw for 505 yards that signaled that this run was far from over. Heading into Soldier Field, both teams were atop their respective divisions with just two losses. New England might have been favored by just one point, but it showed just how much of a challenger the Bears were to several teams that season, so the fans in Chicago were not going to be disappointed.
Everybody got the type of matchup that they wanted: a close and gritty game that saw all three phases make key plays. The Patriots had a couple of boneheaded turnovers that saw Chicago take an early 17-7 lead in the second quarter, but once they got their focus back, they reclaimed their rhythm as well. Besides Brady throwing for 277 yards and three touchdown passes, it could not have been possible without some momentum-shifting plays. The special teams scored twice that afternoon: a 95-yard kickoff return touchdown from Cordarrelle Patterson and a blocked punt scoop-and-score from Kyle Van Noy. Their defense gave up over 330 yards and a few scores to Mitchell Trubisky, but they also picked him off twice, which allowed New England to go ahead by fourteen points in the middle of the fourth quarter. However, the Bears still had a chance to extend the game even further. After a huge interception by Kyle Fuller that resulted in a 25-yard touchdown pass to Trey Burton, the Bears’ defense came up with another stop and gave Trubisky the ball back in hopes that he would send the game into overtime. But with no timeouts and just twenty-four seconds left, a Hail Mary was going to be the inevitable final play. When that time arrived, Trubisky heaved it as far as he could toward the goal line, and it was caught by wide receiver Kevin White at the one-yard line! Unfortunately, the Patriots defenders were right there when the catch was made, and they stopped him just short of the goal-line once the clock ran out. They held on to beat Chicago 38-31 in what was an exceptional performance from both teams, but New England just made a few more plays than their opponent.
New England went on to clinch the second seed in the AFC with an 11-5 record, and even though the critics had no faith in them winning another championship, this team defied the odds once again. They dismantled the Chargers at home, then outdueled Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs in the AFC Championship at Arrowhead Stadium with a 37-31 overtime victory, and finally won a league-leading sixth Super Bowl with a 13-3 win against the Los Angeles Rams. The Bears managed to keep their foot on the gas and win the NFC North with a 12-4 record, but they unfortunately saw their season come to an end in their first playoff game once again. Although they had a chance to win the game with a walk-off field goal from Cody Parkey, the ball bounced off the uprights in the infamous “Double Doink” play that saw their season end against the Philadelphia Eagles with a 16-15 heartbreaking defeat.
#5: Justin Fields Shines on Monday Night Football
The last matchup between the Patriots and Bears before the 2024 season just happened to be the most rewarding night for Chicago and the most humiliating for New England. Tom Brady might have left the franchise after the 2019 season, but they had a promising second-year quarterback in Mac Jones who helped the Patriots return to the playoffs in his rookie year. However, this was his first game back from an ankle injury, and there were a lot of questions as to whether he would start over backup quarterback Bailey Zappe as a result. However, many fans expected a blowout victory against a team that they had not lost to since 2000. The Bears might have had a promising second-year quarterback for themselves in Justin Fields, but they had a lot of flaws that year. Matt Eberflus was heading into his first season as the head coach, and not only was he asked to take control of the defense, but he was tasked with the development of one of the more promising quarterbacks coming out of the 2021 draft. Things didn’t necessarily work out that way. Fields ended up having one of the worst offensive lines in the league that season, their defense finished 2022 by giving up the most points and third most yards out of anybody else, and they won the number one overall pick with a 3-14 record. Their last victory just happened to be against the New England Patriots in Gillette Stadium on Monday Night Football as 8.5-point underdogs. It was supposed to be a game where the Patriots handled their business and blew their opponent out, but the exact opposite took place.
When Mac Jones came back to the field, he looked like a shell of himself and did not have a promising performance. He only completed three passes for sixteen yards and ended the night with an interception, before ultimately getting benched for Zappe in the middle of the second quarter. Maybe the ankle injury was still bothering Mac, but if Bill Belichick was not going to keep him in the game, then Zappe should have gotten the start all along. The fans were ecstatic when he took over because he had done a decent job in the two starts that he won, and he essentially picked up where he left off. After trailing 10-0 to start off the night, Zappe led two quick touchdown drives that gave the Patriots the lead, and it looked like things were heading back to normal. However, the Bears were just unstoppable that night on both sides of the ball. Despite New England sacking Fields four times and picking him off once, they had no answers for Chicago’s running game whatsoever and let them run for over 200 yards in their own house. Many were hoping that Zappe could lift the Patriots out of the mud, but once Eberflus made his defensive adjustments at halftime, he was just as bad as Mac Jones played. He threw two interceptions, New England’s running backs accounted for just 47 rushing yards, and they could not match Chicago’s offensive firepower.
As said earlier, this was the last game that the Bears won that season as they proceeded to go on a ten-game losing streak to clinch the number one overall pick. They might have fleeced the Carolina Panthers when they traded down from that spot, but they still have a long way to go before they achieve legitimacy. Caleb Williams has to be the difference maker that the city of Chicago has been begging about for years and they have to finally head in the right direction with a clear vision. The Patriots on the other hand still had a decent 8-9 season in 2022, but did not make the playoffs. Fast forward two years later and Mac Jones is traded to the Jacksonville Jaguars for a sixth round, the team has their worst season in over 20 years with a 4-13 record, Bill Belichick gets fired after the season, and they draft Drake Maye with their third overall pick. This is a bit of a different situation because Maye is not expected to start right away. He is not going to ever eclipse or match the level of success that Tom Brady had through those dynastic years, but he is under the pressure that he has to get this team back on the map and create a positive legacy of his own. Time will tell to see how he and new head coach Jerod Mayo will look in the upcoming 2024 season, but all that anybody can ask is just improvement and growth, regardless if the Patriots make the playoffs or not.
Main Image: Bob Breidenbach / USA TODAY NETWORK
