The 2018 Bears may be bad, but also a lot of fun to watch

An NFC top tier that’s maybe three times as deep as the AFC’s looks almost certain to exclude quality teams from the playoffs this season. Even the NFC teams that book wild card spots will, barring major injuries, be threats to win Super Bowl LIII.

This glut of championship-caliber NFCers will mean trouble for certain unfortunately positioned teams this season.

The Bears look like the NFC team that’s in the toughest spot, as two Super Bowl contenders and a fringe Lions threat gear up for high-stakes competition in the NFC North. Chicago appears caught in the crosshairs of an arms race, which is interesting because no NFC North team — and perhaps no NFL franchise — transformed itself more than the Bears did this offseason.

As the Bears prepare to deploy what certainly is set up to be an improved operation, it may not show up in the standings. Chicago has finished fourth in its division in each of the past four seasons and has the inside track on its first-ever last-place five-peat.

Dim prospects about Chicago’s competitive chances this season aside, this Bears team could be one of the most fun editions the franchise has unveiled in decades.

Excepting John Fox’s Broncos seasons, the Bears’ previous coach brought one of the league's lowest fun ceilings. In his place, Matt Nagy will at least make the Bears interesting. It probably won’t translate to them keeping pace with the Vikings or Packers, but Nagy and new offensive coordinator Mark Helfrich appear set to throw some weirdness at the NFL this season.

Nagy potentially attempting to further college-ize Andy Reid’s offense via Helfrich will matter more in Chicago than it would almost anywhere else — because for one of the NFL’s most storied franchises, the Bears have displayed an alarming lack of entertaining teams.

The near-100-year-old franchise gave the football-following world peak fun with the 1985 Bears. There’s no denying that cast's place on the NFL Must-Watch Mt. Rushmore. But for the bulk of the rest of the NFL-in-color period, the Bears have not exactly been a go-to for general gridiron buffs. 

This franchise featured arguably the greatest running back ever (Walter Payton), an all-time, open-field demon (Gale Sayers), the NFL’s most dynamic return man (Devin Hester) and one of the best linebackers in league history (Dick Butkus). But those players’ apexes mostly occurred on teams that minimized some of their brilliance.

Butkus and Sayers never played in a playoff game. While Payton’s prime lasted as long as any running back’s, his athletic zenith came in the late 1970s — when he was the centerpiece of unremarkable rosters. Hester’s rookie season sits firmly among the Bears’ most enthralling iterations, but Rex Grossman made it a chore to watch the 2006 NFC champions' offense. That pattern persisted, even into the Matt Forte years.

Jay Cutler possessed more talent, and his big-body receiving duo of Brandon Marshall and Alshon Jeffery sits at Nos. 1-2 on the Bears’ single-season receiving-yardage list. But the cannon-armed quarterback became increasingly apathetic (and ultimately uneventful) as his Windy City tenure progressed. Even the final Mike Ditka years, including playoff sojourns in 1990 and ’91, looked more like a band touring to promote its fourth-best album than anything close to 1985's magic.

The 2018 team will at least intrigue. 

The Bears have not enjoyed many noticeable passing attacks. Jim McMahon’s 1985 Pro Bowl nod doubles as the only Bears quarterback to earn such acclaim in the past 62 years. The Bears are one of two teams, along with the Eagles, that have never had a 4,000-yard passing season. And no active franchise's single-season, passing-yardage high (Erik Kramer, 3,838 in 1995) is lower than Chicago’s.

Mitchell Trubisky may not resemble McMahon or even Kramer this season. His 29.2 Total QBR as a rookie finished as the NFL's second-worst mark. But that came with maybe the league's worst set of pass-catchers in an unimaginative offense. Nagy and Helfrich won’t be guilty of that, and if they are, this movie’s trailer is an all-time tease. 

General manager Ryan Pace spent to equip his second-year quarterback with weapons; Allen Robinson, Taylor Gabriel, Trey Burton and Anthony Miller are each more exciting than any wideout or tight end Trubisky targeted last season.

Nagy will surely have to simplify the Reid/Alex Smith playbook he helped build the past two seasons, but the new Bears coach played a big part in rebooting one of the NFL’s safest quarterbacks. That undoubtedly helped convince the Redskins to trade for Smith and finalize a lucrative extension.

As recently as 2015, the Chiefs sported one of the NFL’s dullest offenses, with Smith earning his checkdown-artist reputation. Once Nagy became Reid’s sidekick in 2016, more college concepts — ahead-of-their-NFL-time formations, odd presnap action, myriad shovel passes, and, obviously, RPOs — populated Kansas City’s game plans.

Reid and Nagy vexed the eventual Super Bowl champion Eagles with these concepts and saw the Patriots, after being run off the field in Week 1, copy one of the Chiefs' designs. 

While Smith, Tyreek Hill and Travis Kelce made some of this madness possible, Robinson has a 1,400-yard season (with Blake Bortles) on his resume, and Chicago’s Jordan Howard-Tarik Cohen tandem will be difficult to contain in an innovative attack. Helfrich's Oregon rushing offense was renowned for its creativity, and Cohen gives the Bears a different kind of chess piece.

Trubisky’s limitations may impede implementation of some of these looks, but this figures to be one of the most interesting offenses in Bears history. That jolt will be vital, given how many unexciting offenses this franchise has presented in recent years.

Such progress almost certainly won’t elevate the Bears to the playoffs, but if Trubisky emerges amid Nagy and Helfrich’s scheme, this will morph into a legitimate bridge year and make 2018 memorable regardless of Chicago's divisional finish.

Even if those signs aren’t apparent this season, the Bears will be an NFL Sunday Ticket stopping point — and not just for Red Zone-fixated fantasy heads — for the first time in ages.