they led the NFL<\/a> with the most games missed by players due to injury in 2025. Notable defenders like Jaylon Johnson, Kyler Gordon, Austin Booker, Dayo Odeyingbo, and Shemar Turner all multiple months at a time with injuries. Some of the disruption they faced in going from Braxton Jones to Theo Benedet to Ozzy Trapilo at left tackle came from the former two both suffering injuries, as well.<\/p>\nAnother key statistic that didn\u2019t help Chicago at all was the lack of penalty luck they received from their opponents.<\/p>\n
Warren Sharp of Sharp Football Analysis posted on Twitter\/X on Thursday, ranking all 32 NFL teams by how many penalty yards were called against their opponents in 2025. The Bears ranked dead last:<\/p>\n
With the new kickoff rules, let\u2019s say the average field position in today\u2019s NFL starts off at their own 30-yard line. If the Bears got 140 more penalty yards called in their opponents\u2019 favor, that\u2019s two full touchdown drives in Chicago\u2019s favor, and they\u2019d still be in the bottom 10 in penalty yards called on opponents.<\/p>\n
Three of the Bears\u2019 six regular season losses came by fewer than a touchdown. If you add in one of those aforementioned two touchdown drives to two of their losses, the Bears end up 13-4. You never know.<\/p>\n
Granted, am I going to look at every play to see how many missed penalty yards the Bears lost from bad calls by referees? Absolutely not. This statistic has little to no bearing on how the referees called games. Rather, it mainly goes to show the bad luck Chicago got on penalties being called on their opponents in 2025. Here\u2019s hoping they get a little more luck in 2026.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Bears\u2019 2025 season was about as chaotic as a season could get. As far as potential events…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":885421,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2070],"tags":[374,692,391,75257,741,2493,7,53724,57683,6,10682],"class_list":["post-885420","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-chicago-bears","tag-bears","tag-chicago","tag-chicago-bears","tag-chicago-bears-analysis","tag-chicago-bears-news","tag-chicagobears","tag-football","tag-from-the-desk-of","tag-inside-the-numbers","tag-nfl","tag-notes"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/116536962185617296","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/885420","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=885420"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/885420\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/885421"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=885420"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=885420"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=885420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}