‘That’s very wishful thinking’ — Bears veteran says what everyone needs to hear after abrupt ending to the season and what comes next
The Chicago Bears established a winning culture but that doesn’t mean success will be promised in 2026.
The Chicago Bears’ exhilarating season came to a screeching halt on Sunday night, faltering in overtime against the Los Angeles Rams in the NFC Divisional Round. It’s a sudden reality that can be hard for anyone to stomach, but it’s still the reality.
“It’s the NFL, right?” Bears head coach Ben Johnson said after the game. “You make it to the tournament, we knew we had to win four in a row to actually feel good at the end of the thing, and we didn’t get that done. So this is what happened. It ends abruptly.”
Now, the full attention has to turn to 2026 and what improvements need to be made going forward to avoid this kind of feeling from happening again. And the last thing you need to do is throw your head up high and feel good about what you did to get to this point because it wasn’t enough.
Cole Kmet addresses the unspoken regression possibility that everyone needs to hear
The Bears seem to be everyone’s pick as the top regression candidate for the 2026 season. Chicago won seven one-score games with seven fourth quarter comebacks. Defensively, the Bears led the NFL in takeaways and everyone has an opinion on whether or not that can be sustained.
Needless to say, everyone is doubting that this team can replicate what happened this season, much less improve from it. The Bears need to take that to heart and use that mentality to work even harder going into next season.
“The work we put in is for this year, not for next year,” veteran tight end Kmet said in the locker room. “It starts all over. It’s 0-0 and it’s gonna be twice as hard to get to this point, you know? And you can’t take for granted the opportunity you get in this league to get to this chance and to have an opportunity to go to the NFC Championship Game, and then who knows from there? But yeah, to just think that it’s just gonna happen again, that’s very wishful thinking, very wishful.”
Who better to say that than Kmet, the team’s longest tenured offensive player and Chicago native. This is the first winning season Kmet has been a part of in his NFL career and now understands the level of work needed to reach that point and how that level of work still wasn’t enough.
The Bears have a very big offseason ahead to continue building off what this team achieved and it’s going to be a very different team going into the 2026 season. And the Bears are going to go from the hunter to the hunted after how this season went.
Target is now on the Bears back going into 2026
For the first time since 2018, the Bears clinched the NFC North title and went on to claim the No. 2 seed in the conference. Chicago proved that they’re back as a legit contender and a force to be reckoned with. But, the competition has been sharpening their blades and stalking the Bears, especially the other teams in the division.
“We play in a tough division and I know we won the division, but we also went 2-4 in the division this year,” Kmet said. “And those teams are gonna come back hungry. It’s just that much harder. That’s why it hurts when you have the opportunity now and, you know, you just come up a little short. And it stinks, because there’s a lot of work that has to be done to get to this point.”
There’s no guarantee or promise that this level of success follows the Bears into 2026, you have to earn that right. After that 2018 year, the Bears went 8-8, 8-8, 6-11, 3-14, 7-10, and 5-12 in the following six seasons. Things can change in a hurry in this league if you don’t have the right approach.
Fortunately, the Bears have a strong leader at the front in Ben Johnson and he’s not going to let anything slide between the cracks and try to ride off the success of this season.
“We’ll have to write a whole brand new story,” Johnson said “That’s the thing about this, you put in all this work and you sacrifice and trust the people around you, and you can’t take any shortcuts. I wish I could say that this is momentum from year one and it doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t work that way.”
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