Will Bears win NFC North, earn Wild Card spot or miss playoffs? Our staff predictions

Will Bears win NFC North, earn Wild Card spot or miss playoffs? Our staff predictions originally appeared on NBC Sports Chicago

It’s prediction time for the Under Center Podcast. One week after the Bears and the rest of the NFL released the full schedule, the crew broke down the team’s odds to both win the division, or qualify for the postseason as a Wild Card team.

Here’s a (lightly edited for clarity) transcript of the conversation:

Will the Bears win the NFC North this year?

Alex Shapiro: I think this team might be still third in the NFC North.

Josh Schrock: If I were a gambling man– I don’t gamble– I would probably put it 50-1, 40-1.

I just think they’re a year away. They’re talented, they’re young, but Detroit is better. Green Bay is better, and Minnesota could be better. Like just for one year Minnesota could hit lightning in a bottle. Sam Darnold, all of a sudden is good for a year. Brian Flores knows what he’s doing, and all of a sudden, they win 10 games. It’s like, wait, what the hell happened, right? So yeah, it’s a long shot there.

Shapiro: It’s not a talent thing. For me, it’s an established thing. The Bears just came out of the rebuild, right? They went through this whole thing. They’ve got the pieces in place, and now they’re ready to start competing. The other teams in the division have already done that.

The Packers somehow found a way to not rebuild. They just put Jordan Love in there, tweaked the defense and they’re fine. They didn’t really miss a step. Or at least not a big step, maybe a half step backwards. The Lions as we all know, I mean, they are clearly on the other side of this thing. They’re like two years ahead of the Bears.

Kenneth Davis: You still have a rookie quarterback. You have a guy that’s now with a new personnel in (offensive coordinator) Shane Waldron, trying to get all of that to become cohesive behind that rookie quarterback. And we still have to see how stout the offensive line is in the middle. Because we think on the…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/bears-win-nfc-north-earn-194931920.html

Author : NBC Sports Chicago

Publish date : 2024-05-20 19:49:31

Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source.