Lincicome: Nagy says the Bears found an identity Sunday. But what is it?

Time will take care of how this Bears team will be remembered, if it is remembered at all. Maybe the next four weeks will be time enough. With a month of clearly superior football teams ahead, Detroit, the usual footwipe, is left behind to ponder how the better team lost on Sunday. The Bears are still working things out.

A clearly relieved coach Matt Nagy said he had wondered if his team had an identity. "We came out of this game with an identity," concluded Nagy.

Nah.

Other than a compost pile for the flowering of Justin Fields ... wait, that's unkind. Other than a petri dish for the Great Justin Fields Experiment ... no, that's too clinical. Other than the coat room for the gloves and top that of guest of honor Justin Fields ... ah, forget it.

Without the Fields intrigue, the identity of this Bears team is that it has none. It is a team with a blank T-shirt, an empty bumper sticker, a fill-in-the blank bunch.

It is easier to figure what the Bears are not than what they are. They are not the Monsters of the Midway, not Ditka's beloved Grabrowskis, not the SNL Da Bearz. Not yet. Not likely.

This Bears team will never be a team of easy identity, not until Fields is who he is supposed to be. Two long passes right on target hint that Fields can be - though I saw Jay Cutler throw better and more.

Not until the guy who is supposed to be coaching the Bears has a vision rather than Post-its for game plans, listening in to see if the play called is the play he would call. A head coach is either a head or an earbud.

Not until the guy assembling the team doesn't do it like he is borrowing Legos from a discard pile. All the new and used pieces are not something you should leave in the driveway.

But let's give Nagy a fair hearing on this identity question.

So what is this team's identity? Surviving? It is more than that, though that seems to be a lot of it. Making do? That's not T-shirt worthy.

Luck? Too soon to say either way, but with Bears running back David Montgomery joining the infirmary, it would seem to be more bad than good. On the other hand, when a center snap on first and goal bounces off the quarterback into the arms of your defensive lineman, that sort of brings some balance to the question.

Is it design? Not all that either, because game plans seem to be by consensus, and game play calling is again with coordinator Bill Lazor and most effective against teams that treat the red zone like a package return label.

You cannot design the other team driving to your 10-yard line three times and taking no points. You cannot design Detroit doing everything necessary to lose another game to the Bears. When the losing quarterback is better than the winning quarterback you look ahead at all the times these two will meet again and imagine the opposite result.

Doing the expected against the tormented Lions would not be as eyebrow raising but for the renewed adequacy of young Fields, only a week beyond his, and the rest of the Bears, dreadful farce in Cleveland, this close to being arrested for impersonating a paid football team.

"They were blocking their butts off today," said Fields of his offensive line, although viewing from a distance it did not seem to be so.

Until the Bears beat a team, or two, that is not trying to give the game to them, the Cleveland horror seems much more likely than the Detroit donation. The Bears have now, at least for a week, put themselves into the unfortunate place of having something expected of them. From here the expected is ... well, expected.

From here the Bears may prove to be all they can be, which is capable, determined, unshakable, adequate. These are all good, if uninspiring, things to be.

Exciting, exhilarating, gripping, overwhelming, all of those may come later. One expected victory brings the Bears back to tolerable, hardly the stuff of headlines or histories.

The best we can offer is a paraphrase of an earlier vision of struggle. The Bears aren't where they want to be. They aren't where they ought to be. They aren't where they're going to be. But, thankfully, they aren't where they were.

Much work still to be done.