Chicago Bears once again look discombobulated in final minutes during loss to Seattle Seahawks

CHICAGO – Confusion in the final minutes, sloppy offensive play, half a dozen sacks and another ugly loss. That sounds like the 2024 Chicago Bears.

The Bears looked like exactly the team fans have come to expect on Thursday night in an ugly loss, 6-3, at the hands of the Seattle Seahawks at Soldier Field.

It marked the Bears' 10th consecutive loss and dropped their season record to 4-12 with one game remaining.

Quarterback Geno Smith and the Seahawks scored a pair of field goals in the first half and it proved to be enough to win the game. Neither team scored in the second half.

The Bears totaled 179 yards of offense. It was the fourth time that the Bears offense failed to reach 200 yards in a game this season. Quarterback Caleb Williams took seven sacks. His nine-game streak without an interception ended at the very end of the game when he lofted up a last-ditch effort on fourth down that was picked off by the Seahawks.

“The offense was not good enough, and that starts with me,” interim head coach Thomas Brown said.

Williams threw for 122 yards with no touchdowns on 16-for-28 passing. The Bears were playing without left tackle Braxton Jones and without left guard Teven Jenkins. Backups Larry Borom and Jake Curhan filled those two spots, respectively.

The Bears defense played well enough to give the team one last chance to try and win it or tie it up in the final minutes. With the Bears facing a fourth-and-inches at their own 39-yard line, Curhan was called for a false start penalty. What followed was more late-game confusion for a Bears team that never figured out how to handle the final minutes of games under former coach Matt Eberflus.

After the penalty, Brown first sent out the punt unit. He had three timeouts remaining, plus the two-minute warning, with just over two minutes to go in the game.

“The way our defense was playing all day, possibly had a chance to flip the field and force a three-and-out and shorter field,” Brown said.

But then Brown called a timeout and decided to send the offense back on the field for fourth-and-5.

“It wasn’t confusion at all,” Brown said. “I just changed my mind.”

Still, it cost the Bears a timeout, which came back to bite them.

The Seahawks sent an extra blitzer on fourth down and Williams found himself running for his life. He lofted a pass that receiver DJ Moore somehow corralled for a first down.

The drive was alive. Facing a third-and-14 later on the possession, Williams hit Rome Odunze for a 15-yard gain but the Bears – trying to conserve timeouts – wasted nearly 40 full seconds before they ran the next play.

The possession wound up stalling again, this time at the Seahawks' 40-yard line. On fourth-and-10 from the 40, the Bears were outside kicker Cairo Santos' field goal range.

Again they kept the offense on the field. Again Williams tried to make something out of nothing on fourth down. This time, Seahawks cornerback Riq Woolen pulled down a game-ending interception.

It was a discombobulated game from the Bears offense and the indecision from the coaching staff on the first fourth-down situation felt symbolic for a team on a 10-game losing streak.

“You’ve got to stay calm when all the noise is the loudest,” Moore said. “I think we handled that and we’ve just got to figure out a way to get the W.”

The Bears defense held Seattle to six points, but it still wasn’t enough for a victory.

Bears cornerback Kyler Gordon provided one of the few sparks of the night when he ripped the football away from Seahawks tight end Pharaoh Brown late in the third quarter.

Gordon ran the ball back to the end zone while the other 21 players on the field thought the play was over. Even the referees were confused. They discussed the play for several moments before announcing their ruling. They initially called it a touchdown.

Upon further review, however, Gordon was down after ripping the football loose. It was still a takeaway, but it was not a touchdown.

Instead, the Bears offense took over near midfield. Given how the offense was playing Thursday, the Bears might rather have kept their defense on the field.

Not surprisingly, the Bears offense couldn’t score after the takeaway. In fact, it somehow managed to put together a six-play, one-yard drive, picking up a first down before Williams took a 14-yard sack.

The Bears punted seven times in the game. It was Williams' fourth game with at least seven sacks this season.

“I’ll definitely take the heat for this one just because some of the situations that I put us in,” Williams said.