Chicago Ran Hot in 2025 — The Bones Are Real Anyway

Chicago went 11-6 last season, which is a very good football record and also a slightly generous one. The point-differential math — our fitted points-per-win model puts the conversion at one win per 35.8 points — translates that +26 differential into 9.2 structural wins. The Bears actually won 11. That gap, 1.8 wins, is the luck delta, and the place to look for it is the one-score column: 7-4 in games decided by a single possession. That's a strong record in the most random category in football. It's not evidence of clutch; it's evidence of variance, and variance regresses.

None of that is an indictment. A 9.2-win structural baseline from a team that went 11-6 the year before means the underlying roster is genuinely good — the Bears weren't fluky pretenders, they were a real team running a little warm. The honest read is that the foundation holds, the record might not. That distinction matters more in the offseason than almost anything else a number can tell you.

The EPA profile is quietly balanced in a way that doesn't get enough credit. On offense, the Bears posted +0.08 expected points added per pass attempt and +0.07 per rush — both positive, both meaningful, and the fact that the run game is nearly as efficient as the pass game is not something many teams can say. Defenses tend to game-plan for your strength; when your strength is diffuse, that's a structural problem for coordinators trying to stop you. Chicago gave them two things to defend and did both competently.

The defense held its own from the other side of the ledger. Opponents generated +0.03 EPA per pass attempt and exactly 0.00 per rush against the Bears. That rush-defense number is as clean as it reads — opponents were neutral on the ground, which in practice means Chicago's front was taking the running game away and forcing teams into the air, where they found modest but not decisive success. The result was a unit that didn't need to be elite to be effective.

The one crack worth noting is the red zone: −0.01 EPA per play inside the opponent's 20 is slightly negative, meaning the Bears were marginally below break-even when the field compressed and execution premiums went up. They converted 47 percent of third and fourth downs — a serviceable but not dominant number. Ben Johnson's decision index shows 0.41 expected wins lost to suboptimal go/kick calls, with an actual go-rate of 21.7 percent against a model-recommended 34. That's meaningful room on the table — the model wanted him going for it on fourth down nearly 60 percent more often than he did — and it held the team's decision-making grade to 73.6 percent agreement with optimal play. For context, the offense's efficiency numbers already made Johnson look smart; the fourth-down numbers suggest there's still more to unlock.

The offseason roster movement is modest in dollar terms and measured in ambition. On the arrivals side, Coby Bryant comes over from Seattle on a three-year deal at $13.3 million annually — the market prices that at 1.06 wins, which makes it a top-of-market safety contract by percentile. Devin Bush lands at linebacker on a $10 million APY deal (0.77 market wins), and Neville Gallimore fills interior defensive line depth at $5 million (0.33 market wins). The room isn't transformative, but it's intentional — Chicago is patching the backend of a defense that was already functional.

The departures give some of that back. Tremaine Edmunds heads to the Giants on a $12 million APY deal (0.94 market wins). Safety Kevin Byard goes to New England (0.50 market wins) and Jaquan Brisker to Pittsburgh (0.37 market wins). The net on a market-wins basis is +0.35 — Chicago imported slightly more than it exported by price. On a production basis, the number rounds to zero, which tells you what the brief honestly acknowledges: these are replacement-level transactions, not upgrades.

The two new contract verdicts carry WATCH tags. Darnell Wright signed a four-year extension at $29 million annually — that's the 99th percentile of right-tackle pay for a 25-year-old with no clean exit written in. The falsifier here is time: if the RT market's ceiling moves well past $29 million by 2027, this reads like foresight rather than aggression. Wright is young enough that the bet isn't unreasonable, but the price discipline flag is real. The Bryant deal at $13.3 million per year (96th percentile for safeties) carries similar markup risk, though a 2028 exit at only $4 million dead gives Chicago a manageable trapdoor if the performance curve flattens.

The draft class adds 3.98 chart wins across seven picks. Dillon Thieneman, a safety out of Oregon, lands at pick 25 with 1.16 chart wins — the largest single-pick value in the class and, notably, the third safety Chicago added this offseason. The Bears are clearly committed to the back end. Logan Jones at center (0.80 chart wins, pick 57) addresses interior offensive line depth. Sam Roush, a Stanford tight end, comes in the third round at 0.73 chart wins, followed by LSU wide receiver Zavion Thomas at 0.54. The back half of the class — cornerback Malik Muhammad, linebacker Keyshaun Elliott, and defensive lineman Jordan van den Berg — contributes a combined 0.75 chart wins across three rounds. No compensatory picks are projected for 2027.

The net offseason move is close to neutral, which for an 11-win team coming off a lucky year is a reasonable outcome if not an exciting one. Chicago didn't tear anything down and didn't meaningfully upgrade the parts that produced those 9.2 structural wins. The defensive back investment — Bryant, Thieneman, and the safeties who departed — amounts to a lateral reshuffle rather than a step forward. Whether Bush improves on what Edmunds gave them is genuinely unknowable from the production data available; both entries show no production-wins figure, which means the brief is honest about the uncertainty rather than papering over it.

The cap picture is where this team's character shows most clearly. The quarterback carries only 5.7 percent of the cap — a number that, in the current market, is either evidence of a rookie deal still running or a franchise that found itself a genuine bargain. Either way, it's structural oxygen. Montez Sweat and Jaylon Johnson are the two largest hits at 8.1 and 7.9 percent respectively — elite-position spending on an edge rusher and a cornerback, which is defensible. The cornerback group as a whole is the biggest relative investment on the roster (a z-score of 2.49, meaning Chicago is spending at the extreme high end of the league distribution), and the edge group sits at 1.52. If the defense delivers, that's a coherent philosophy. If it doesn't, there's not a lot of flexibility to pivot.

The albatross flag on Cole Kmet is the quietest problem in the building. He's taking 2.5 percent of the cap while producing at the 16th percentile for his position — paying 77th-percentile money for 16th-percentile output. That's the kind of contract that doesn't break a team but consistently taxes it, a dollar or two of dead weight that better-run organizations don't carry. The offset is Colston Loveland, who sits at the 81st production percentile on a 60th-percentile contract — a genuine windfall at tight end, and the kind of internal efficiency that funds everything else. The two tight ends tell you something about where the roster's value is hiding and where it's leaking.

The arithmetic is straightforward. The 2025 point differential translates to a structural base of 9.2 wins. The offseason ledger adds zero production wins — the moves are market-priced shuffles, not demonstrable upgrades. The coach decision delta is also zero: Johnson is back, and his decision index doesn't move the needle in either direction relative to last year's baseline. The sum is 9.2 structural wins for 2026.

That is an accounting projection from the ledger — not a pick, not a betting line, not a promise. It says: if this team plays to its underlying efficiency and the one-score variance normalizes toward the mean, nine wins is what the construction earns. The falsifier is ten wins or more. If Chicago clears that threshold, the ledger's neutrality was wrong, and something improved that the offseason transactions didn't capture — Johnson's fourth-down aggression, a leap from the young skill players, a defense that outperforms its price. That's the case for the optimists, and it's not implausible. It just needs evidence that isn't in the numbers yet.

The brief surfaces no vacated-target opportunity from departures, which means there's no clean target-share math to run here. The offseason additions are all defensive — Bryant, Bush, Gallimore, Thieneman — so the fantasy-relevant roster construction is largely the same group that produced those EPA numbers last year. No aging flags are flagged in the data.

The sleeper case the brief supports is Loveland. He's producing at the 81st percentile for tight ends on a 60th-percentile contract, which is exactly the efficiency-price gap a sleeper argument requires. The market, by the contract's own terms, hasn't fully priced what he's doing. That doesn't generate a point projection — it generates a structural argument that the value is there before you get to opportunity. Pair him with the offensive EPA profile (positive in both the pass and run games, a coaching staff with room to grow its fourth-down aggression), and the usage case has a reasonable foundation. The Kmet contract overhead is a small counterweight — Chicago is paying for two tight ends but getting most of its production from one. Which one the targets flow to matters more than the aggregate, and the efficiency numbers point in Loveland's direction.

Everything above traces to a live instrument, and the receipts stay public: the GM boards carry Ben Johnson's decision card, the team's cap posture ($279.4M already charged to future caps), and every contract verdict with its falsifier and review date — including Darnell Wright (WATCH), Coby Bryant (WATCH). When the season grades these reads, the grades post whether they flatter us or not.