Bears

Soldier Field sits on the Chicago lakefront with 61,500 seats, a Doric colonnade wrapped around a modern bowl added when the stadium went through a $632 million rebuild between 2002 and 2003 — work that pushed the Bears out for a season to play at Memorial Stadium in Champaign before they came home. They had already made one earlier move to get there, leaving Wrigley Field after the 1970 season, when Soldier Field became the permanent address.

The franchise itself started somewhere else entirely, as a company team fielded in 1919 for the A.E. Staley starch works in Decatur, Illinois. It joined the American Professional Football Association the following year as the Decatur Staleys, then followed the business to Chicago in 1921 under the same name. George Halas bought the club from Staley in 1922 and renamed it the Bears, then spent decades running it as owner, coach and executive at once — long enough to earn the nickname "Papa Bear."

Nine championships trace back through that history, eight of them from the pre-merger NFL era and one Super Bowl, won at the end of the 1985 season when Mike Ditka's team beat the New England Patriots 46–10. That roster is where "Monsters of the Midway" gets said most often now, built around Walter Payton and a defense that carried Richard Dent to the Super Bowl's Most Valuable Player award.

Green Bay has been the opponent for all of it. The rivalry goes back to 1921, the year the Bears arrived in Chicago, which makes it the oldest still played in the NFL — a history that gives every meeting between the two an edge the schedule alone wouldn't explain, back to a franchise that began as a starch company's works team in Decatur.