T.J. Edwards had transparent reaction to his touchdown and the Bears’ defensive collapse that followed in Week 17
The hot start for Chicago’s defense quickly evaporated on Sunday night.
The Chicago Bears knew they would have to score a lot of points and do their best to defend against the San Francisco 49ers offense last Sunday night to have any chance to steal a road win.
Things started off in the best way possible to accomplish that. On the first offensive play of the game, 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy had his first pass deflected by cornerback Jaylon Johnson and the ball landed in the hands of linebacker T.J. Edwards. Edwards took the ball back 34-yards for his first career NFL touchdown to give Chicago an early 7-0 lead. A huge moment to send an early statement.
But, the defensive spark evaporated quickly and Chicago ended the game allowing 42 points and nearly 500 yards of total offense.
T.J. Edwards shares reaction he received from the pick-six and eventual defensive collapse
“It’s special, man. First one in the NFL, so to be able to do that at the beginning of the game was cool,” Edwards said, via 670 The Score. “More so, right now, I’m just trying to look back and prove [more]. I noticed that, after the game I checked, I got a bunch of texts after the pick-six and I didn’t get many texts after that. It’s cool to make a play, but we need more of them, for sure.”
Such is life in the NFL. Everyone is with you during the highs but quicky move away during the lows. For the players, the outside noise shouldn’t mean anything but that was a pretty real and fitting reaction that Edwards shared.
The focus now in Chicago needs to be on how the defense can clean up some of the issues that caused that implosion to occur and Edwards added some of his thoughts on the matter.
“It’s a week-to-week league,” Edwards said. “Anytime after a game like that, there’s always going to be concerns and you’re always going to want to look at everything as a whole and see what we did well and what we didn’t. I just think from a group standpoint, we weren’t good enough. But, again, we have another opportunity coming up this week against a really good football team. We know we gotta make those corrections and make them now.”
Red zone performance is what killed the Bears defense against the 49ers
The biggest concern came from the defense’s performance in the red zone, something head coach Ben Johnson admitted talking to reporters on Monday. All season the Bears have allowed a ton of yards, but the unit had previously been able to tighten up when backed up in the red zone.
Look no further than the Week 16 game against the Green Bay Packers, where Chicago held the Packers offense to 0/5 in the red zone. Against San Francisco, however, the 49ers scored five touchdowns inside the red zone.
“We were doing some uncharacteristic things in terms of how they were executing,” Edwards added. “That’s a good football team, obviously, really good players on a good offense, they play well together. But, we expect to go out there and execute at a high level, and we didn’t. I think we’ve shown that we can do it, so it’s really getting down to the details and figuring out exactly what went wrong and being very critical of ourselves. It’s one of those things we don’t shy away from.”
Truthfully, the Bears got dominated. The 49ers dictated the game plan on first and second-down and had a strong run game for all four quarters. When you do that, it makes third-down much harder for the defense, especially when you’re backed up in your own end zone. It’s what great offenses do and the Bears defense hasn’t been able to hang with those kind of units this year.
Which now leads us to the Week 18 rematch against the team that scored a season-high 52 points against this defense back in Week 2. This is the week for the Bears to prove they can adapt on defense or confirm this is just who they are in 2025.
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49ers defender reveals multiple players went off-script to defend against Bears QB Caleb Williams on the final play of Week 17
Too bad the Bears managed to beat themselves first on that play.
