Somewhere above Dwight Clark is smiling.
But c.f. the 2-point debate above, the Bears decide to gamble on overtime…
Aaarg, Bears needed inside kick and touchdown and got both. Packers get it first in overtime and drops it on a 4th and 1. Bears only need field goal.
Well, not bad with backup QB.
Brian
They got a TD. Lions would have controlled their own destiny with a Pack win, but now they have to pray GB loses at least 1 of their last 2.
Good. Better. Best.
We really tried to Bears it up. But in the end, we decided to FTP.
Gotta admit the last pass that won the game for the Bears was a thing of beauty. Heck, the Packers’ defender was all over the receiver (on his back with his arm around his neck reaching to stop the catch…probably would have been pass interference I think) yet DJ Moore (the receiver) still got it. I’m honestly not sure what more could be expected from the defense and still it was caught. I saw the replays several times and I still could not believe it.
Jump to 20:45 in the video below (for those who want to see the play mentioned above):
No question it was a highlight wheel for the ages thing. Amazing. Exciting.
But explain to me please.
That seemed like a high risk play while they were already pretty close to field goal range. Nothing wrong with choosing the high risk option and it paid off, but why then not have had the same faith in going for the two point conversion at the end of regulation?
I could just as easily have seen Williams not quite threading it just right and that being intercepted. Losing the game on the next drive. And us all second guessing that they should have gone for the conversion or played it safer that down getting into more confident FG range.
The 2025 Bears are hard to pin down. Not sure we have ever seen something like them.
On paper they are very mediocre. Their stats are ok but nowhere near the stats of the top teams. They should be lucky to be a .500 team. And the bean counter boffins will tell you, rightly so, that any team can get lucky a time or two but they cannot rely on it and will lose in the end.
And I 100% agree. So, either the Bears are really weirdly blessed with luck this season or they have something else going on that lets them win. They’ve won six games in the last two minutes this season. That’s crazy. Yet, here we are with them at the top of their division.
Not sure how to explain it. I have no idea. They have some juju that sees them through. Green Bay dominated the whole game (as they did a couple weeks ago). Yet in both cases they never ran away with the game. The Bears were always just a score or two away.
I dunno how they do it.
I will say I really liked this game. A throwback to the black and blue league of yor. This was a slug fest. A grudge match. And neither team let up for a moment. It was all gas and no brakes. I have missed that in the much more sanitary and clinical NFL of the past few years. Playing by a spreadsheet instead of just pounding it out on the field (no doubt the spreadsheet boffins are sitll there on the sidelines). This was 60+ minutes of excellent football. I am happy the Bears won but I am more happy to see this football coming back. It is exciting and fun to watch.
It was first-and-10 on the Packers 46. IMO, a deep corner route is not a particularly high-risk play, as the ball is (ideally) thrown so that only the receiver can catch it, and there’s just one defender. Obviously, any time a pass is thrown there’s a risk of an interception, but this route is far less risky than, say, a pass over the middle.
Even if it’s incomplete, they still had 2 or 3 downs to advance the ball farther down the field and get into FG range.
We have: just last year, in the form of the Chiefs. All that magical “juju” mysteriously evaporated this year, despite very little change in their base stats. [In point of fact they actually improved a bit, at least in terms of yards/play, 5.1/5.3 vs. 5.5/5.4.] I remember arguing with quite a few Dopers last year that they were simply insanely lucky, only to be told that KC “knew how to win”, had some magical secret sauce, etc. It all went poof in the Super Bowl, and remained MIA this year.
I appreciate the explanation. But damn that coverage was tight and Williams is capable of amazing throws but also occasionally … inconsistent. That “ideally” in your explanation does a lot of work!
That said it was ideally thrown and ideally caught!!
Honestly, on paper, Williams is a mediocre QB as NFL QBs go.
But again, he does something like that pass.
I get the juju theory is not a good one but their seems to be something more here we are not seeing. We see the results which are amazing but the ingredients don’t seem to add up to this.
But, here we are and with a golden pass like that.
Or, this is the KC Chiefs again as mentioned above by @John_DiFool . Just really lucky and no way this carries them far even if it has for a long moment.
As much as I’d like to see the Bears win a Superbowl I doubt they will survive the playoffs. Especially if they have to play Green Bay again (which seems a real possibility). I think Green Bay has their number and the Bears really got a miracle on this one. I still like it though.
I am definitely not the most informed here, but clearly this coach is making the right calls for this team. Enough of the time.
Just speculating here…if the Bears win their division and get the #2 seed (behind the Seahawks), they could indeed play the Pack in the wild-card round. Right now the Packers are the #7 seed. But if they stumble in their last two games, the Lions could be the #7 seed.
Of course, the Bears play the Lions in the final game of the season. And that’s after they play the Niners. At this point, Chicago isn’t even assured of a playoff spot.
True. After their win last night I saw the stat monsters say the Bears have a 75% chance for the playoffs now. Green Bay 15% and Lions 10% (not counting the Wild Card).
Nothing is a lock yet. And if last night taught us anything it is that anything can happen, no matter how improbable (I think the stat on recovering an onside kick was something less than 1% (or maybe 8%…I forget)…which is just one of several improbable things that happened in that game). Completely off the charts. Probably giving Vegas oddsmakers fits.
They don’t care as long as the bets are even on each side which they almost certainly are.
Which makes me wonder why the job of oddsmaker even exists. If the goal is to balance each side of the bet it seems a simple task for a computer program to handle. (a question for another thread I think)
It’s definitely and obviously the goal. They do use computers as one of their tools. It’s not simple.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the “lucky, or good?” coin, we have the Packers.
In their five losses, they have lost by a grand total of 23 points. In two of those losses, plus the tie against the Cowboys, they had a lead in the fourth quarter, which they couldn’t hold onto.
Bad luck? Poor coaching? Hard to say.
It is 8%. 1 in 12. It was mentioned in the video I posted above at around the 0:40 timestamp.
Browns scored a TD on their opening drive. I don’t think that’s ever happened before. I don’t know how to react to it