It’s natural for a Chicago Bears fan 35 years old or younger to approach this season with apprehension. Because we’ve been here before.

The 2018 Bears were the surprise worst-to-first team in the NFL before making an early exit in the playoffs. And every time that has happened the Bears have gone into the next season with sky-high expectations. Almost every time, they have let down. Just this century, the Bears went into the 2002, 2007, 2011 and 2014 seasons with high expectations, but failed to make the playoffs each time.

But there are plenty of reasons to believe this team won’t take us through the same hell as those much-anticipated teams of the past. Here’s why:

The Quarterbacks

Mitch Trubisky doesn’t have to be an elite quarterback. He’s still better than Jim Miller, Rex Grossman and, possibly, Jay Cutler.

Miller went 11-2 as the Bears starter in 2001 during a 13-3 season in which they had the best defense in the league and won a series of mid-season miracles. (They were subsequently trounced by Philly in the playoffs.)

But Miller was bad. That season he completed just 57.7 percent of his passes for 13 touchdowns and 10 interceptions, averaged just 5.8 yards per attempt with a passer rating of 74.9. He was in the bottom 10 pretty much across the board statistically. The next year Miller was actually better statistically, but he was still well below league average and managed to play in just eight games before his career ended.

Perhaps the biggest mistake any Bears team has made came in 2006 when Rex remained Lovie Smith’s quarterback through thick and thin. Grossman threw touchdowns at a high rate, but completed less than 55 percent of his passes, had one of the worst interception rates in the league and was bottom ten in passer rating.

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Do yourself a favor.

Don’t read any Bears content today. 

Enjoy the day, the sunshine, the cold beverage, the warm hot dog (or grilled chicken if you’re in the middle of an intense weight lifting / weight loss regiment).

Today is Labor Day. Many worked hard so you wouldn’t have to.

The heavy lifting on DBB starts tomorrow.

There were facts. There were hopes. Now there are predictions. Well, one.

No reason to bury the lede. I’m predicting the 2019 Chicago Bears to go to the Super Bowl, face the Kansas City Chiefs, and beat them. For the first time in the history of this blog, I believe the Bears are going to win a championship. Hell, for the first time since I’m four years old, I believe the Bears are going win a championship. I’m not hedging. I’m not putting up qualifiers. I’m saying it in bold letters:

DBB PREDICTS THE BEARS WILL WIN SUPER BOWL 54

Do any other predictions really matter?

No.

Enjoy Labor Day Weekend! We get to the real stuff next week.

Yesterday, just the facts, ma’am. Today, the hopes. Our season preview continues by looking at six things – that if they happen – the Bears have a chance to be the best team in the league.

Hope 1. Mitch Trubisky will improve.

4,000 yards. 30+ touchdowns. 10-15 interceptions max. If Trubisky hits those numbers, he’s on the road to being one of the best in the game.

Hope 2. David Montgomery will be a very good running back.

The core of the Bears offense is their center and guards. Daniels, Whitehair and Long are angry, tough men.  Montgomery is a big back that is hell to bring down. If the rookie is as advertised, the Bears could have the game’s best closer.

Hope 3. Eddy Pineiro will solidify the kicker position.

Here’s what the Bears fan wants: a kicker they don’t worry about from 43 yards. You wanna miss a few 52 yarders? Fine. You wanna be 75% from 45-50? Fine. But just be iron clad from inside 45. Be a steady, reliable figure for the organization. And stay the fuck off morning television.

Hope 4. The Bears will get production from the tight end position.

Trey Burton disappointed in 2018 and then mysteriously no-showed the playoff game. Adam Shaheen is all gravy, no meat. Ben Braunecker is nothing special but he’ll certainly find himself playing meaningful snaps this season. The Bears have a lot of toys (Tarik Cohen, Cordarrelle Patterson) to move the football but they still need the tight end spot to produce.

Hope 5. Allen Robinson will stay healthy.

Robinson has shown flashes of being an elite wide receiver but he has 56 catches total over the last two seasons due to health reasons alone. If the Bears want their passing attack to be explosive, Robinson needs to be on the field.

Today is the beginning of a three-part season preview, broken into specific categories: Facts, Hopes and Predictions. 

After Marc Trestman’s first season in Chicago, fans became irrationally optimistic.

No, the team didn’t have a winning record. No, they didn’t make the postseason. No, they couldn’t play a lick of defense. But the offense was fun to watch and Bears fans didn’t know how to handle that. So they jumped right to, “This team is winning it all in 2014!”

This space fought that optimism from day one. Teams don’t win Super Bowls with terrible defenses and the coach/quarterback relationship looked combustible to any objective observer.

What followed was the most embarrassing season in the history of the franchise. The Kromer Campaign.

This year the optimism is warranted. The Chicago Bears are a legitimate Super Bowl contender. And there are three facts to support that contention.

Fact 1. The Bears have the best defense in the league.

Does it require any more explanation? This Bears defense is frighteningly talented and Pace/Nagy added Chuck Pagano – one of the more aggressive defensive play callers in the sport – to lead them. If this group is ranked outside the top five in any of the important categories it’s because they have suffered several debilitating injuries. If the Bears find themselves with home field advantage in the postseason, this defense would make them overwhelming favorites to make it to Miami.

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The Bears roster is interesting because it’s incredibly deep at positions like running back, wide receiver and defensive line, but have almost no depth at cornerback, tight end and offensive tackle. Perhaps a trade could be in the works, but it’s much more likely that what we see is what we get. So, here are five players the Bears can’t be without:

Roquan Smith

I thought about using Danny Trevathan here because Trevathan makes the defensive calls — an underrated aspect of any defense — but I have little doubt that Smith could take that over. Smith is so good, I think he’s going to be what Ryan Pace considers a multiplier (players who make those around them better) very soon.

I’ve highlighted issues with depth before so I don’t need to go into it too much. I will say that it was nice to see Joel Iyiegbuniwe making plays last week.

Kyle Fuller

The Bears survived much of two games without Fuller’s counterpart Prince Amukamara last year but Fuller is a different story.

Both of the team’s starting cornerbacks are good, but there were times when Prince looked a step slow and committed some silly penalties down the field. Still, Kevin Toliver II was a noticeable downgrade from him last year, so it would be even more significant should they lose their best corner.

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I did a mini pub crawl in my neighborhood of SunnyWood, Queens on Saturday. (SunnyWood is how I combine the neighborhoods of Sunnyside and Woodside.) It started at 2 PM and involved three blonde ladies, many Irish gents and a few too many Montauk Summer Ales. By 8 o’clock I was face down in a drool-soaked pillow, dreaming I was at a dinner party with the original Broadway cast of Jesus Christ Superstar.

I woke up hazily in the middle of the night to a phone with 13 texts. That’s too many. “Somebody died,” I thought. The texts read like an old school news wire.

Luck.

Luck done.

Whoa!! On the bottom line. Luck is retiring!

(And so on.)

Nobody will ever confuse me with someone who loves the NFL Draft and all the bullshit that now accompanies it. Millions upon millions of dollars piled into a weekend of guessing. But Andrew Luck looked to me, coming out of Stanford, to be the surest thing in my lifetime. He was big. He was tough. He was smart. He had a brilliant arm. He came from a solid football lineage. There simply wasn’t a flaw in the game or character. When he ended up in Indianapolis, I penciled them into the postseason yearly for the next decade plus.

Then he started getting hit.

A lot.

From day one.

Luck was sacked 41 times in his rookie season behind a terrible offensive line that intellectually over-matched GM Ryan Grigson refused to fix. After that 41-sack campaign, the Colts went with a front five the following season as bad as any in the league. Why? Because they knew Luck would still get them to 10+ wins. And he did.

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.@EddyPineiro goes the distance!

58 yards. Straight down the middle. #CHIvsIND pic.twitter.com/l9ybyO7aY1

— Chicago Bears (@ChicagoBears) August 25, 2019

Eddy Pineiro has never attempted a field goal in the NFL. And right now he’s the only game in town. But while many of the folks covering the the 2019 Chicago Bears – this space included – have spent the last month exploring outside options to fill the gaping kicker crevasse on the roster, the best case scenario is the easiest one: Pineiro has a perfect Saturday night and builds some confidence heading into the opener.

Some is the pivotal word in that sentence. There is no way to be entirely confident in Pineiro, who has been anything but reliable since joining the club. Just look at the way his being the last kicker remaining has been framed by the national football outlets. PFT described him as still being on “thin ice”. NBC Sports reported he won the battle…for now. Nobody, not even members of the Pineiro family, think he won anything. He simply survived a competition wherein the other competitors are now filling out job resumes at Charles Entertainment Cheese pizza establishments.

Is this origin story … widely known? pic.twitter.com/UMF7gkSbge

— Siddhartha Mahanta (@sidhubaba) August 19, 2019

There are also nightmare scenarios for Saturday night. What if Pineiro goes 1-4, missing a few short ones? What if he misses an extra point or two? What if he doinks a kick? (I mean, can you fucking imagine?) What if he simply doesn’t look the part of a professional kicker? The Bears could go to sleep Saturday night having to deal with two concrete facts: (1) they do not have a kicker and (2) they have a real game, against their oldest rival, in primetime, in front of a massive audience, in twelve days.

Preseason is and should be meaningless. But because this organization has recklessly neglected the kicker position, they have put an extreme amount of import into a random practice game in Indiana in August.

Now all Bears fans can do is wait. And hope.