Bears

The Bears go into another NFL season with a roster built around a young quarterback — Caleb Williams inherited the job from Justin Fields, with Rome Odunze and Cole Kmet around him — and a franchise still measuring itself against a defense it hasn't matched in forty years.

That defense earned the team its nickname. "Monsters of the Midway" belonged first to the University of Chicago Maroons, and the Bears took it after putting 56 points on the New York Giants in 1943; the label went quiet, then came back in the 1980s to describe a unit built around Mike Singletary and Dick Butkus that terrorised the league. It peaked in the 1985 season, when the Bears won Super Bowl XX — the club's only Super Bowl, set against eight NFL Championships won before the Super Bowl era existed, the last of them in 1963.

The franchise itself did not start in Chicago. George Halas founded it in 1919 as a company team for the A.E. Staley starch works in Decatur, Illinois, and moved it north two years later; the Bears name arrived in 1922, once the club had settled at Wrigley Field. Halas stayed on as coach and executive long enough to shape most of what followed, including a list of Hall of Famers that runs from Red Grange and Bronko Nagurski through Walter Payton and Gale Sayers.

Soldier Field has been home since the Wrigley years, rebuilt inside its colonnades in 2003 and now holding 62,500 — the smallest ground in the NFL. Across town from that renovation sits the oldest rivalry in the league: Chicago against Green Bay, running without interruption since 1921.