Last week, the Chicago Bears came crashing back down to Earth with a blowout loss at the hands of the Baltimore Ravens. The ugly defeat brought Chicago's impressive four-game winning streak to an end and also raised old concerns about the viability of Caleb Williams as an NFL franchise quarterback.
Next up for the Bears is a road game against the Cincinnati Bengals, who recently allowed the lowly New York Jets to pick up their first win of the season.
There have been several injury concerns for the Bears this week in practice, and on Thursday, the team got a mixed bag of updates on those players.
“DJ Moore (hip/groin), Rome Odunze (heel), Olamide Zaccheaus (knee) were all upgraded to LIMITED. Luther Burden III (concussion) was DNP for a 2nd straight day,” reported Courtney Cronin of ESPN on X, formerly Twitter. “Tyrique Stevenson (shoulder) was FULL. Good sign for him rejoining the Bears secondary vs. Bengals. Cole Kmet had a 2nd straight day of being limited.”
Cronin also noted that there was “Still no D'Andre Swift (groin), Roschon Johnson (back), Dominique Robinson (ankle).”
Overall, the Bears would certainly like to have a clean bill of health when they take on a Bengals team that will surely be playing with some desperation after their embarrassing loss to New York.
Chicago looked mightily impressive during their recent win streak, although questions about their strength of schedule over that stretch kept most predictions conservative about just how much to read into that hot run of games, and if it was sustainable.
Still, a win against the Bengals will put the Bears back two games over .500, with another seemingly easy matchup against the New York Giants coming after that. The game against the Bengals is set to kick off on Sunday at 1:00 PM ET from Cincinnati.
