Bears

The Bears go into another NFL season chasing the standard set nearly four decades ago, still playing out of Soldier Field and still measured against a defense that once carried them to a title nobody has matched since. That defense belonged to the 1985 team, built around the "46 Defense," and its run ended with a 46–10 rout of the New England Patriots in Super Bowl XX. Fourteen years earlier the team had gone by a different name entirely: George Halas and Edward "Dutch" Sternaman took the Decatur Staleys to Chicago in 1921, and by 1922 the club had become the Bears. Halas ran it, in one capacity or another, until 1983, and ownership stayed inside the same family through Virginia Halas McCaskey until 2025.

Before the Super Bowl era, the Bears had already collected eight NFL Championships, starting with that first Staleys title in 1921 and closing with a 14–10 win over the New York Giants in 1963. Between those two came the 1940 title game, in which Chicago beat the Washington Redskins 73–0 — still the largest margin of victory in NFL history. Against Green Bay, the rivalry has run since 1921 and carries a weight neither side lets the other forget, the oldest grudge in the league.

No franchise has sent more players into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and few names sit closer to the top of that list than Walter Payton. He ran the ball in Chicago from 1975 to 1986, went into the Hall in 1993, and remains the figure the club is still, in some sense, measured against.