This is the space where I'm supposed to talk about how only Patriots fans, Steelers fans, and total sickos watched the very meh Thursday Night Football game between New England and Pittsburgh, but lord knows there are plenty of sickos out there who watched every second of this game, myself included. But I fall into a very important fourth camp as well: I'm a Chicago Bears fan who was hoping that for the second time in five days, the Pittsburgh Steelers would lay a dud against a team that was threatening the Carolina Panthers for the worst record in the league. And wouldn't ya know it…

Heading into Thursday night, the Bears odds of securing the #1 pick in the 2024 Draft via the Carolina Panthers was somewhere between 65 and 70 percent depending on where you looked. Given New England's 21-18 win last night against the Steelers, those odds must've shot up.

The irony here is that for the second consecutive year, the Bears have been helped by former Bears. Last season, in the final week of the season, it was former Bears head coach Lovie Smith who coached the Houston Texans to a week 18 win that clinched the #1 pick for the Bears. This year, it's former Bears quarterback Mitchell Trubisky who has been under center for each of the Steelers last two losses, to Arizona and New England, two of the biggest threats to Chicago's quest of owning the 1st overall pick in the NFL Draft for the second consecutive season.

Of course, the Bears too have their own pick in the 2024 NFL Draft as well, which looks like it will land somewhere between 6-10.