Rozner: In today's NFL, Bears have a chance

There are at least a few reasons why the Bears have gone from 2-5 and thinking about 2016 to 4-5 and contemplating the playoff race.

The simplest, of course, is that the NFL is atrocious and you don't have to be very good to win a football game these days.

Never has "any given Sunday" been more real, in particular last week when nine underdogs won outright, including Detroit at Green Bay, Kansas City at Denver and Houston at Cincinnati.

But Occam's razor aside, what the Bears have done has been impressive coming off the Marc Trestman disaster.

For perhaps the first time since Mike Ditka put Rickey Watts' equipment in a garbage bag and threw it out of the locker room, a Bears coaching staff is not afraid to ruffle feathers and make changes.

These coaches refuse to watch bad players play badly, so they are constantly on the lookout for new faces. Sometimes they're stuck with what they have, but when they can make a move, they do it.

Even when the change looks minimal, they find players who can at least follow directions and replace those who can't.

While that may not seem like much, in a league with such a razor-thin difference between winning and losing, players who are where they're supposed to be is often enough to alter the outcome.

So the coaches have been dumping players almost from the moment they arrived, and unlike the head coaches of the last couple of decades, these guys don't really care about anyone's feelings or their stature.

They didn't like Jay Cutler when they got here, so the front office shopped the quarterback shortly after arriving. When they found no interest, they worked with Cutler and have turned him into a functioning NFL QB.

To his credit, Cutler didn't pout, instead seeing offensive coordinator Adam Gase as the man who could save his career, and together they have fashioned an offense that works for both the quarterback and the team.

On the other side of the ball, Vic Fangio is getting it done with a terrific scheme and precious little talent, at least as impressive as what's occurred on offense and in some ways even more so.

The Bears have no impact players in the secondary, occasionally one in the middle and rarely on the defensive line, which makes what Fangio has done remarkable.

This was one of the worst defensive groups in the NFL the last few years and Fangio has managed to make something out of almost nothing.

The Bears are likely to lose both coordinators to head-coaching jobs in the off-season, but John Fox doesn't seem to have trouble finding good coaches, so there's reason to hope he can do it again.

But the Bears' 2 victories after falling to 2-5 hardly suggests the Bears are on the road to greatness, and there's something of an irrational exuberance in the air after road victories against San Diego and St. Louis.

The Bears will face Denver and Green Bay in the next five days and both were considered very good teams only a couple of weeks ago. But as is the case in the NFL this season, neither appears to be very good right now and both look eminently beatable.

If the Bears can get one or both, they will be in a spot over the last five weeks to go on a run and get themselves in playoff contention.

That would be quite an accomplishment in the first year for Fox considering just how bad the Bears were last year, and how ugly it's been at times this season.

But this is a new era of NFL football where few teams can boast a strong offensive line to support a genuine NFL quarterback, and few teams are out of a game or a season.

Welcome to the new NFL. Like it or not.

brozner@dailyherald.com

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