Chicago Bears

• 1. Introduction

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  The Chicago Bears were born from a phone call. In March of 1920, George Chamberlain, general superintendent of the A. E. Staley Company, telephoned a man named George Halas. Chamberlain's offer was straightforward: come to Decatur, Illinois, and run the company's football team. Halas accepted. What followed was one of the longest stories in American professional sport. The Bears are one of only two franchises still operating that played in the NFL's very first season, in 1920. Their championships, their records, and the characters they produced made them central to football's history. But they have also become a study in the distance between past greatness and present struggle. What built the franchise into something so enduring? And what explains the gap between that history and the modern team's long search for a second Super Bowl title?

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• 2. From Decatur to Chicago

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  Augustus Eugene Staley, owner of an Illinois food starch company, established the Decatur Staleys in 1919 as a company team. The club won the Central Illinois Championship in its first year. In 1920, Staley hired George Halas and Edward "Dutch" Sternaman to run the team when it joined the newly formed American Professional Football Association. Full control passed to Halas and Sternaman in 1921, when the franchise relocated to Chicago. Staley provided five thousand dollars toward the arrangement, with one condition: keep the Staleys name for one more season. In 1922, Halas renamed the club the Bears.

  Wrigley Field, home of the Chicago Cubs, became the Bears' new home stadium. Since bears are the adult counterpart of cubs, the name established a natural link to the city's sporting landscape. Halas chose the team's colors from loyalty to his alma mater, the University of Illinois. The Bears adopted darker versions of that school's orange and blue: navy classified as Pantone 5395, and an orange close to burnt orange, classified as Pantone 1665.

  In the NFL's first six years, no team other than the Canton Bulldogs and the Chicago Cardinals defeated Chicago more than once. The Bears recorded 34 shutouts over that stretch. Their rivalry with the Chicago Cardinals ran from 1920 until the Cardinals departed the city in 1959. That matchup shaped four of the first six league title races and remains the oldest continuing rivalry in the NFL.

  December 1932 brought a landmark. A blizzard made outdoor play in Chicago impossible, so the Bears and the Portsmouth Spartans moved their postseason game into Chicago Stadium. Chicago won 9-0, producing the first indoor game in NFL history. The league took that result as proof that an annual championship game was worth institutionalizing. The following year, the Bears played in the first official NFL Championship Game, defeating the New York Giants 23-21.

  In 1921, Halas arranged for the Green Bay Packers to be expelled from the NFL. His aim was to block them from signing a particular player. Once the Bears had closed that deal themselves, Halas worked to have the Packers readmitted. It was an early sign of the competitive edge that would characterize the Bears-Packers rivalry across the following century.

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• 3. Red Grange Changes Everything

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  By the mid-1920s, the Chicago Bears faced a business problem as much as a sporting one. A typical home game drew five thousand to six thousand fans. Meanwhile, a University of Chicago football game could attract forty thousand to fifty thousand. The club needed a name that fans would pay to see. They found one in Red Grange, the University of Illinois star regarded as the finest player of the era.

  The Bears signed Grange within a day of his final college game. The move so alarmed the rest of the NFL that the league established a permanent rule: no team could sign a player until his entire college graduating class had completed its time at the school. Agent C. C. Pyle negotiated Grange's contract at two thousand dollars per game. Early on, Grange watched from the sidelines, learning plays from quarterback Joey Sternaman. In one of his first appearances, the Bears beat the Green Bay Packers 21-0.

  Later in 1925, the Bears organized a barnstorming tour to place Grange in front of the largest possible audiences. Seventy-five thousand people paid to attend a game against the Los Angeles Tigers, a hastily assembled team of West Coast college all-stars. The Bears won 17-7. The tour also produced a 60-3 victory over a semi-professional club called the Portland All Stars. Those crowds were larger than professional football had almost ever generated.

  In 1926, a contract dispute ended the partnership. Grange left for the New York Yankees of the newly formed American Football League, a rival circuit owned by his agent C. C. Pyle. The Bears replaced him with Paddy Driscoll, using proceeds from the barnstorming tour to fund the signing. The rival league lasted only one season before folding, and Grange returned to Chicago. After rejoining the Bears, he divided his time between playing football and making movies. That combination offered an early glimpse of what athlete celebrity in professional sport would eventually look like.

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• 4. Monsters of the Midway

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  From 1940 to 1947, quarterback Sid Luckman led the Bears to victories in four out of the five NFL Championship Games they entered. Chicago adopted the University of Chicago's discarded nickname "Monsters of the Midway" during this period, along with the wishbone-C helmet design and a newly penned theme song that declared the team "The Pride and Joy of Illinois." Luckman set the franchise's passing records for career touchdowns, yards, and completions between 1939 and 1950. Many of those marks stood for decades.

  The most famous single result of that era came in the 1940 NFL Championship Game at Griffith Stadium. The Bears defeated the favored Washington Redskins 73-0, a score that remains the most lopsided in NFL Championship history. Behind that result was a new offensive formation that Halas introduced. He called it the T-formation: instead of the traditional single running back, it placed two backs in the backfield, multiplying the offense's options against defenses built for a different game.

  The late 1960s produced players of a different kind of renown. Dick Butkus and Gale Sayers both built Hall of Fame credentials before injuries cut their careers short. Brian Piccolo, a running back who died of embryonal carcinoma in 1970, became the subject of a 1971 American television movie called Brian's Song. The film starred James Caan as Piccolo and Billy Dee Williams as Sayers. It was later released for theatrical screenings after its television debut. Jack Warden won an Emmy Award for his portrayal of George Halas, a recognition of how thoroughly the coach had become inseparable from the franchise's public identity.

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• 5. The Halas Legacy

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  George Halas coached the Bears off and on for forty seasons, an NFL record. He had been there from the very start, a charter member of what became the NFL. In 1963, the Pro Football Hall of Fame inducted him in its very first class. The Bears trail only the Green Bay Packers in total NFL victories and championships, a standing shaped by the rivalry Halas himself helped ignite from the beginning.

  By the time of the AFL-NFL merger in February 1970, Halas was the only surviving founder of the league. The other owners recognized his place in history by electing him the first President of the National Football Conference. The NFC Championship trophy was later named the George Halas Memorial Trophy. Halas remained the club's president and principal owner until his death on the 31st of October 1983.

  The day after Halas died, on the 1st of November 1983, his oldest daughter Virginia McCaskey assumed control as majority owner. Halas had originally intended his son George "Mugs" Halas Jr. to inherit the franchise, but Mugs died of a heart attack in 1979. Virginia's husband Ed McCaskey succeeded her father as chairman of the board, and their son Michael became the third team president in franchise history. Virginia held the honorary title of secretary of the board; her own family described her as the glue that held the franchise together. In 1982, just over a year before his death, Halas made one final consequential hiring. He brought back his former tight end Mike Ditka, who had played for the Bears from 1961 to 1966, to serve as head coach.

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• 6. The 1985 Bears

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  Mike Ditka's gritty personality had earned him the nickname "Iron Mike" long before he began coaching. The 1985 Bears dominated the NFL with a defensive scheme called the 46 defense and a collection of players who became recognizable figures across the country. One of the season's pivotal moments came during a game against the Green Bay Packers at Lambeau Field: Ditka deployed 315-pound defensive tackle William "Refrigerator" Perry as a running back. Perry scored a touchdown, and the image traveled far beyond the stadium.

  The 1985 team's only regular-season loss came in the thirteenth game, a Monday Night Football appearance against the Miami Dolphins. Much attention was paid to the Dolphins' significance: they remained the only franchise in NFL history to complete an entire season and postseason without a loss. The very next day, the Bears recorded "The Super Bowl Shuffle." The song was a novelty rap in which players declared they were "not here to start no trouble" but "just here to do the Super Bowl Shuffle." Recording it before the playoffs had even begun was a deliberate risk. The Bears won Super Bowl XX after the season, defeating the New England Patriots 46-10 in what was then a record margin of victory.

  "The Super Bowl Shuffle" reached number forty-one on the Billboard Hot 100 and received a Grammy nomination. The Super Bowl XX broadcast drew a Nielsen rating of 48.3, placing it seventh in all-time American television history at the time. The Bears' success that decade inspired a recurring Saturday Night Live sketch called "Bill Swerski's Superfans." George Wendt, a Chicago native and co-star of Cheers, played the host of a radio talk show, with a rotating cast that included Robert Smigel, Mike Myers, and Chris Farley. Ditka led the Bears to five more postseason appearances after the 1985 championship, reaching as far as the NFC Championship game in 1988. A return trip to the Super Bowl never arrived. The sketch stopped in 1993, the same year Ditka was fired.

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• 7. The Long Search

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  Between Ditka's firing and the hiring of Lovie Smith in 2004, the Bears employed two head coaches: Dave Wannstedt and Dick Jauron. Each reached the playoffs exactly once; neither posted a winning overall record. From 1997 to 2000, the Bears finished last in their division four consecutive times. A 13-3 season in 2001, led by quarterback Jim Miller, ended in a 33-19 first-round playoff loss to the Philadelphia Eagles. The 1990s were, by most accounts, a decade the franchise would rather not revisit.

  Lovie Smith, hired on the 15th of January 2004, brought the Tampa 2 defensive scheme to Chicago and lifted the franchise quickly. By the 2006 season, the Bears had reached Super Bowl XLI, their first championship game appearance in more than twenty years. They lost to the Indianapolis Colts 29-17. The club rewarded Smith with a contract extension through 2011 at roughly five million dollars per year, making him the lowest-paid head coach in the NFL at the time. He was fired on the 31st of December 2012, after Chicago went 10-6 but missed the playoffs.

  From 2011 to 2026, the Bears went fifteen years between playoff wins. Over that span they cycled through twenty-three different starting quarterbacks and six head coaches. John Fox posted a 14-32 record during his tenure. Matt Eberflus then produced an NFL-worst 3-14 record in 2022, including a franchise-record ten-game losing streak, results that secured the first overall pick in the following draft. Eberflus became the first head coach in Bears history to be fired mid-season, dismissed on the 29th of November 2024, with five games remaining.

  Ben Johnson, hired on the 21st of January 2025, became the franchise's eighteenth head coach, charged with developing first-overall pick Caleb Williams, a quarterback from USC. The 2025 Bears finished 11-6, won the NFC North, and qualified for the playoffs for the first time since 2020. The team set an NFL record by completing six late fourth-quarter comebacks during the regular season. After defeating the Green Bay Packers in the Wild Card round, the Bears fell to the Los Angeles Rams in the Divisional round. In September 2025, a minority stake sale valued the franchise at 8.9 billion dollars. That figure will rise or fall depending on what Caleb Williams and Ben Johnson build next.

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