Thursday, September 25th, 2025, and welcome to an audio game preview. For those of you who've been around the Bears blog for a long time, you're going to recognize how I opened this game preview, and I'm going to say, why do I like the Chicago Bears this week? I always like the Chicago Bears, and listen, I don't toot my horn very often, but last week's game preview was about as good as I've done in a long time. All the things that I talked about in that game preview came to fruition on Sunday. We wanted to see Caleb and Ben develop, we did. We wanted to see how he would use the young weapons, he used them a ton. We wanted to see how Dennis Allen would compensate for these injuries, and we saw a defense flying into the football, taking the football away, playing with toughness, and we wanted to see guts from an organization that seemed lacking them the week previous. And folks, I think we can look now at these first three games and see that Lions game a little bit differently, because that Lions team followed up a Bears win by going into Baltimore and really beating up Baltimore, really beating them up at the line of scrimmage. That is a really good Lions team, and through three weeks of this season, and I know it's probably not the popular pick, Dan Campbell's my coach of the year because he's showing that the program is bigger than the pieces. So that Lions loss, even if it was a blowout, even if it was ugly, that Lions loss might not look bad in a month or two if that team rolls off a bunch of wins and repeats their success with a regular season a year ago. But now we're looking ahead and we're looking ahead to a Raiders team that is one of the stranger roster constructions in the sport, and roster construction including coaching staff. They went out and hired an old coach, and when you go out and hire an old coach, you're almost in win-now mode. And the old coach went out and hired an old quarterback, but somebody he trusts in Geno Smith. The Raiders are built in so many ways to be a win-now team, except they're not that good. And they're in a division with three decisively better teams. So while they're built seemingly to win now, no one thinks in their right mind they're going to win now. So the Bears go in there, and this is an intriguing week for two reasons. Number one, if the Bears win this game, and I don't care if they win this game 9-6, I don't care if they win this game 12-10, if the Bears win this game and get to the bye week at 2-2, the entire mood will have turned a 180 surrounding this franchise. At 2-2, heading into a bye, you cannot argue that a season is not possible. You cannot argue that this team can't string together enough good games to be relevant at Christmastime, to be playing in January. You can't do it. 2-2 was always the goal for these first four games. New program, quarterback learning, new system, a lot of young pieces, rebuilt offensive line. If you could get to that bye week at 2-2, you had to be happy with it. The Bears are favored. They have a prime opportunity to get there. But the other element of this, and it's super important for a young program, it's super important for a new head coach, you've got to build on success. You cannot take two steps forward and two steps back, to quote the great Paul Abdul. You have got to take what you did against the Cowboys and build on it. I say this all the time, I'm a broken record. There's no show points, right? We don't have an East German judge telling you how good you looked early in the season. It's about wins. It's about stacking wins, and then when you get to Thanksgiving, you need to be healthy and playing well for your homestretch run. This team has a lot of positive momentum right now. They have got to continue it. Don't turn this franchise's fan base back on their heels. Go out there and win a game. Get to 2-2 and really start to see positivity.