This magical Bears season is beyond explanation. Is it divine intervention?

Posted January 14, 2026 12:11 pm

By Dan Pompei

A patch with the letters VMH has brightened the jersey of every Chicago Bears player this season. It sits as close to their hearts as the numbers will allow.

The patches are a tribute to Virginia Halas McCaskey, the matriarch of the team, whose one-year death anniversary falls two days before Super Bowl LX. They are as good an explanation as any for how this team keeps winning games that have been described as miraculous.

This Bears season, maybe more than any of the 105 that preceded it, has been about faith. These Bears apparently play with an absence of doubt, and their superpower is the ability to have conviction without proof.

In the first half of their wild-card playoff game against the Packers, the Bears were as flat as a soda can run over by a truck. They trailed by 18 at halftime when coach Ben Johnson told his troops they were on the verge of the greatest comeback in team history. That game was one of seven in which the Bears were left for dead in the final two minutes, only to be resurrected and win.

Johnson has engineered comebacks better than he’s explained them. That’s no fault of his because no one can explain what’s happened.

Johnson has coached brilliantly, and if he continues to lead and scheme as he has, he will be remembered as a peer of McCaskey’s father, George Halas. Quarterback Caleb Williams has separated himself from competitors by not losing games and elevating in the biggest moments, the two most important things a quarterback can do.

But beyond the obvious, something abnormal and unquantifiable has lifted the Bears.

How can we explain Brandon McManus’ misses?

The fortuitous fumble by Jayden Daniels?

And another by Malik Willis?

What about that tell from Raiders long snapper Jacob Bobenmoyer before Josh Blackwell blocked a field-goal attempt?

The Bengals somehow missed 15 tackles, including two on tight end Colston Loveland’s 58-yard game-winning touchdown.

Remember Cairo Santos’s walk-off, game-winning 48-yard field goal in Minnesota? It veered left off his foot and appeared to be headed outside the left upright, then it swerved right. How does that happen?

There was a dropped interception by Steelers safety Kyle Dugger that led to a field goal in a 3-point win.

How improbable was Romeo Doubs botching an onside kick?

The Bears were beneficiaries of Joe Burrow’s turf toe, Aaron Rodgers’ fractured wrist and Micah Parsons’ torn ACL.

McCaskey sat in the same pew for 6:15 Mass every morning. She wore away the orange and blue colors on the beads of her rosary. No one had a deeper appreciation and understanding of the Bears. She experienced more of the Bears’ history than anyone, including her father, and once called the team “her life.”

She began attending games in the 1920s. Along with her father’s fledgling franchise, she was picked up and carried by Red Grange — the Galloping Ghost took her in his arms so he had a reason he couldn’t sign autographs. The 73-0 victory over Washington for the 1940 championship was her favorite game. She saved splinters from the goal posts that were torn down that day in a jewelry box. No one ever caught her Super Bowl shuffling — she hated that song and video — but 1985 was her favorite season.

Mostly though, she endured lean years, with the worst of losses bringing her to tears. She lived until she was 102 and watched 68 seasons in which her team failed to have a winning record. Somehow, though, she never stopped believing.

This is not the first time the Bears have risen to heavenly heights amid suspicions of supernatural intercession.

Walter Payton, McCaskey’s favorite Bear of all time, died on Nov. 1, 1999. Six days later, the Bears were 9.5-point underdogs against Brett Favre’s Packers, who had beaten them in 10 straight. The Bears came out of the tunnel at Lambeau Field with Payton’s No. 34 patches in the same spot that today’s Bears wear VMH patches.

They led by one point and it appeared they would lose when Packers kicker Ryan Longwell approached the ball for a 28-yard field-goal attempt with seven seconds remaining. Then Bears defensive lineman Bryan Robinson stunned everyone, including himself, by blocking the kick.

“Walter Payton picked me up in the air,” Robinson said after. “I can’t jump that high.”

Nobody expected the Bears to make the playoffs on the morning of Dec. 16, 1979. They had one game to play and would be postseason spectators — unless they could beat the St. Louis Cardinals by at least 30 points and the Dallas Cowboys could upset the Washington Redskins, who were ahead of them in the standings.

At the team breakfast before the game, the players learned team president Mugs Halas, Virginia’s brother, had died at 54 of a heart attack. During the game, they appeared to have some special juju working, as they ran a reverse, a flea flicker, a fake field goal and a fake punt (the latter was caught for a 22-yard gain by 14-year veteran Doug Buffone in his last regular-season game). Payton won the rushing title on his last carry.

Shortly after a 42-6 Bears victory, the Cowboys and Redskins kicked off. Bears players stuck around, some in the locker room and some in the parking lot beneath Soldier Field. But when Washington went up by 13 with five minutes to play, many headed home thinking their season had ended. Then the Cowboys scored a last-minute touchdown to win 35-34.

The Bears dedicated a game ball to the memory of Mugs.

Finally, consider the exchange between George Halas and Mike Ditka before Halas’ death in October 1983. He gave Ditka a bottle of Dom Perignon with a note. “Don’t open until we win the Super Bowl,” it read. Ditka waited to fill his flute until the night of Jan. 26, 1986.

When the team plane from New Orleans landed in Chicago the next day, McCaskey walked off the runway with the Lombardi Trophy in her hands.

Thirty-three years later, McCaskey had a chapel built at Halas Hall where players and employees can throw up Hail Marys. After her death, the chapel was dedicated to her. The plaque outside the chapel calls her “A WOMAN OF STEADFAST FAITH.”

And if the chapel was not busy before games this season, it should have been after.