Chicago Bears

The franchise that would become the Chicago Bears began in 1919 when A.E. Staley, owner of the Staley Starch Works in Decatur, Illinois, hired George Halas to organize a company football team. The Decatur Staleys joined the American Professional Football Association in 1920 — the league that would become the NFL. Halas was a player, coach, and organizer all at once, a one-man front office who believed professional football could rival baseball as America's pastime.

In 1921, Staley handed the team to Halas, giving him $5,000 and asking only that he keep the Staleys name for one more season. Halas moved the team to Chicago, played at Cubs Park (later Wrigley Field), and by 1922 had renamed them the Bears — a deliberate nod to the Cubs, suggesting that football players were bigger than baseball players. It was a marketing move, and it worked.

The 1920s were chaotic, formative years for professional football. Halas and his Bears were at the center of it all. He helped recruit Red Grange — the most famous college football player in America — for a barnstorming tour in 1925, a gambit that put professional football on the national map for the first time. The Grange tour drew enormous crowds and proved that pro football could fill stadiums. Halas was building something bigger than a team; he was building a sport.

The 1930s and 1940s were the Bears' first golden age. Under George Halas and with the revolutionary coaching mind of Ralph Jones and later Halas himself, the Bears popularized the T-formation offense — a scheme that would eventually transform the game at every level. With Bronko Nagurski bulldozing defenders and Red Grange still electrifying crowds, Chicago won NFL Championships in 1932 and 1933, establishing themselves as the league's flagship franchise.

The pinnacle came on December 8, 1940, when the Bears destroyed the Washington Redskins 73-0 in the NFL Championship Game — the most lopsided game in professional football history. The T-formation, with Sid Luckman orchestrating it, was so devastatingly effective that every team in the league eventually adopted some version of it. The U.S. military even studied the Bears' playbook. Luckman, a Brooklyn kid who became the NFL's first great modern quarterback, led Chicago to four championships in the 1940s.

The Bears earned their fearsome nickname "Monsters of the Midway" during this era, borrowing the moniker from the University of Chicago's football team. The name stuck because it was accurate. Chicago played a bruising, physical brand of football that terrorized opponents. Between 1932 and 1946, the Bears won six NFL Championships and appeared in four others, a run of dominance that cemented Halas as the founding father of professional football.

The postwar years were a period of gradual transition for the Bears. George Halas stepped away from coaching from 1956 to 1957, handing the reins to Paddy Driscoll, but returned in 1958 determined to rebuild. The team remained competitive but could not recapture the championship dominance of the previous era, as the NFL grew larger and more complex.

The late 1950s and early 1960s saw Halas assembling the pieces that would produce one more championship run. He drafted and developed players like Bill George — who essentially invented the middle linebacker position — and Rick Casares, while building a defensive philosophy that would become the franchise's identity for decades to come. The Bears were always tough, always physical, always reflecting the blue-collar character of Chicago itself.

By the early 1960s, Halas had put together a roster talented enough to compete with Vince Lombardi's Green Bay Packers, who were in the midst of their dynasty. The rivalry between Halas and Lombardi, between Chicago and Green Bay, became the defining storyline of the NFL's pre-Super Bowl era.

In 1963, George Halas coached the Bears to their eighth and final NFL Championship, defeating the New York Giants 14-10 at Wrigley Field. It was a triumph of defense — the Bears intercepted Giants quarterback Y.A. Tittle five times — and a fitting capstone to Halas's coaching career. He was 68 years old, and he had been involved with professional football since its very beginning.

Halas retired from coaching for good after the 1967 season, though he remained the team's owner until his death in 1983 at age 88. Without Papa Bear on the sideline, the franchise drifted. The Bears cycled through coaches — Jim Dooley, Abe Gibron, Jack Pardee, Neill Armstrong — without finding anyone who could replicate Halas's combination of authority and innovation. The team made occasional playoff appearances but was largely irrelevant in an era dominated by the Steelers, Cowboys, and Raiders.

The 1970s were particularly bleak. The Bears were bad, and worse, they were boring. Wrigley Field, which had been a cathedral of football for four decades, became a monument to frustration. The franchise needed a complete reinvention, and it was about to get one in the form of a brash young coach named Mike Ditka and a defense for the ages.

Mike Ditka arrived as head coach in 1982, hired by George Halas himself — Ditka had been Halas's tight end in the 1960s, and the old man saw something of himself in Ditka's combative intensity. But the real genius of the 1980s Bears was defensive coordinator Buddy Ryan, who designed the 46 defense — an aggressive, pressure-heavy scheme that overwhelmed offensive lines and turned quarterbacks into terrified wrecks.

The 1985 Bears were perhaps the greatest team in NFL history. They went 15-1 in the regular season and steamrolled through the playoffs, capped by a 46-10 demolition of the New England Patriots in Super Bowl XX. The defense, featuring Mike Singletary, Richard Dent, Dan Hampton, Steve McMichael, Otis Wilson, and Wilber Marshall, allowed an average of 12.4 points per game and recorded 64 sacks. Walter Payton, the greatest running back of his generation and the heart and soul of the franchise, finally got his championship ring.

The tragedy of the Ditka era is that the 1985 team never repeated. Buddy Ryan left to become head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles, and while the Bears remained competitive through the late 1980s — making the playoffs six times between 1984 and 1991 — they never recaptured that singular magic. Ditka's tenure ended after a 5-11 season in 1992, but the '85 Bears had already become immortal, the standard against which every great defense would be measured.

After Ditka's departure, the Bears entered a prolonged period of mediocrity. Dave Wannstedt, Ditka's defensive coordinator in Dallas, was hired in 1993 but never found his footing in Chicago. The team made the playoffs just once in Wannstedt's six seasons, and his tenure was defined by quarterback instability and uninspired football.

Dick Jauron took over in 1999 and was named Coach of the Year in 2001 after leading the Bears to a surprising 13-3 record, but the success proved unsustainable. Chicago was exposed in a 33-19 playoff loss to Philadelphia, and the following seasons confirmed that the 2001 campaign was an anomaly built on an easy schedule and some fortunate breaks. Jauron was fired after a 7-9 season in 2003.

Through it all, the Bears moved from Soldier Field to a temporary home at the University of Illinois' Memorial Stadium while Soldier Field underwent a controversial renovation that reduced its capacity and grafted a modern spaceship-like structure onto the old colonnades. The new stadium was polarizing — some saw it as a modernization, others as an architectural crime — but it gave the Bears a 21st-century home.

Lovie Smith brought defensive credibility back to Chicago. Hired in 2004, Smith built his team around the Tampa 2 defense and a generational middle linebacker named Brian Urlacher. The Bears became feared again, and in 2006 they reached Super Bowl XLI — the franchise's first Super Bowl appearance in 21 years.

The Super Bowl itself was heartbreak. Despite Devin Hester's iconic opening kickoff return for a touchdown against the Indianapolis Colts, the Bears lost 29-17 in a rain-soaked Miami. Rex Grossman's quarterback play was the fatal flaw, and the defeat underscored a recurring theme in Bears history: transcendent defense undermined by inadequate quarterbacking.

Smith remained for eight more seasons but never got back to the Super Bowl. The Bears made the playoffs in 2010 behind Jay Cutler's best season, reaching the NFC Championship Game before losing to Green Bay. It was always the same story — the defense could compete with anyone, but the offense couldn't keep up. Smith was fired after the 2012 season, replaced by Marc Trestman, who lasted just two disastrous seasons before the franchise turned to John Fox and then Matt Nagy.