Good morning, Bears fans!
Two days of schedule leaks and we’re still waiting to see the Bears mentioned?
NFL clearly saving the best for last.
— Kevin Kaduk
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01 NFL Schedule
No overseas trip for Bears
There was only one international possibility for the beloved — the Falcons in Madrid — and it was erased with Tuesday’s announcement the Bengals are bound for Spain this fall. (Gives us more time to plan a Bears By 7 trip to Europe in 2027.)
02 Bears Fans
2026 tickets go on sale Thursday
The general public gets a crack at tickets at 7:30 on Thursday night, just after the schedule release. Full details here. May the odds forever be in your favor.
03 Stadium News
Park District’s plan for Soldier
If and when the Bears leave, the head of the Chicago Park District tells NBC’s Mary Ann Ahern the iconic lakefront venue will be transformed into a “world-class music destination.” Potential renovation cost? $630 million.
What a Haul!
A care package from Talley Brand arrived yesterday and made my day.
The trio of hats are LEGIT (love the stitching) and I’ve been overdue for a few new t-shirts. It’s merch for Bears fans, created by a Bears fan and Rob has been super supportive of my efforts to launch Bears By 7 over the past month.
To stock up for the summer and the season ahead, use code BEARSBY7 to get 10 percent off your order plus free shipping.
Strength of Schedule Is A Sham
2026 Team | Opp. Winning % (2025) |
|---|---|
1. Chicago Bears | .550 |
2. Miami Dolphins | .542 |
3. Arizona Cardinals | .538 |
4. Green Bay Packers | .538 |
5. Kansas City Chiefs | .536 |
No matter how the games are ordered come Thursday night, we know the 2026 Chicago Bears will be facing the toughest strength of schedule in the league.
We will also know it won’t matter in the slightest.
The TL;DR version of why that is:
Strength of schedule doesn’t factor in anything that happened before the last game of last season and the first game of this one. Did an opponent sign an impact free agent, draft a handful of studs or see their franchise cornerstone retire? Doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t consider how games were won or lost. The NFL is parity driven and the outcomes of games are highly variable. Turnover luck or injury lists do not exist in the SOS world.
It’s absolutely irrelevant once the season begins: How does that old adage go? “It’s not who you play, it’s when you play them?” As much as things can change in the offseason, they change even faster from week to week in the regular season.
As fans of the Chicago Bears, we should be familiar with the ruse.
Last year’s team entered the season facing a strength of schedule of .571, the second highest in the league. Even with a last-place schedule, their slate contained 10 games against seven opponents who made the playoffs in 2024.
By the end, the Bears held the fourth-easiest strength of schedule and only played five games against playoff teams, the second-fewest in the league.
What happened?
Three of the seven playoff teams they were scheduled to face didn’t have great seasons with quarterback injuries/play keeping the Ravens, Vikings and Commanders from a return trip to the postseason.
Aaron Rodgers didn’t play at Soldier Field, neither did Micah Parsons. The Bears had to face Joe Flacco instead of Joe Burrow on the road.
The Eagles team was not the same one that blew the doors off the Chiefs in the Super Bowl less than a year earlier.
Only the Lions really lived up to their part in the preseason strength of schedule, beating the Bears twice en route to … a last place finish in the NFC North.
On the flip side, anyone who “benefited” from having the Bears calculated in their 2025 SOS found that adding Ben Johnson and plenty of offensive weapons around Caleb Williams can really make a difference from Matt Eberflus and Shane Waldron.
Just as this year’s opponents won’t look at the Bears’ 11 wins in the formula and see all the last-minute comeback wins it took to get there.
Or, of course, whatever improvements Ben Johnson and staff will make to ensure the last-minute comebacks won’t be necessary in 2026.
So what should we be considering instead?
Warren Sharp argues that we should be looking at the predicted win totals (over-unders) from Vegas sports books instead.
Those starting lines bake in offseason transactions as well as actual analytical models of improvement and regression.
The bad news for the Bears? Using Sharp’s method, they will still face the sixth-hardest schedule in the league. That should track considering the overall strength of the NFC North, the two AFC East powers and the first-place schedule they’ll have to face.
In 2025, only two of the eight teams with the toughest schedules ranked by predicted win totals made the playoffs.
And yet in the end, no model or algorithm can accurately predict the beautiful mess of turnovers, injuries, weather and whatever else goes into determining our moods every Monday morning during the fall and winter.
We know the Bears are trying to build something lasting and to do that, they’re going to have to do it in tough conditions year after year.
Bring it on.
Amazing story on how Ben Johnson ripped a Pro Bowl WR before declaring that he (Johnson) would be wearing a gold jacket in Canton one day. (Twitter)
Seven Bears who won’t survive the salary cap in 2027. (Sports Illustrated)
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