Say this for the Chicago Bears: they lose with a consistent style seen nowhere else in the NFL. While the Cleveland Browns, the league’s standard bearer for failure, seemingly jump from quarterback to quarterback every week and get a new head coach most every season, the Bears fail with a clear plan in place. Never reactionary or quick to pull the trigger on a franchise-altering move, they simply plod ever forward. A steam ship churning towards a horizon that never has a sunrise.

In the 24 years since Mike Ditka moved on from Chicago, the Bears have employed just five head coaches. Jay Cutler has been the team’s unquestioned starting quarterback since arriving via trade before the 2009 season – an NFL era so long past that the Browns were still deciding then between Brady Quinn and Derek Anderson. Only Tom Brady, Ben Roethlisberger, Eli Manning, Philip Rivers, Aaron Rodgers, Drew Brees and Matt Ryan have started for the same team longer than Cutler among current QBs.

Yet despite the Bears’ unwillingness to run through coaches and players, you may have noticed that Chicago are not consistent playoff contenders. In fact, barring a massive turnaround in the final month of the season, the Bears will finish last in their division for the third year in a row, the first time that’s happened since Dave Wannstedt and Dick Jauron combined to do it four years in a row between 1997 and 2000. Chicago will miss the postseason for the sixth year in a row and ninth in ten, with just four postseason appearances in 22 years and only eight winning seasons in the past 25. It’s a resume of modern failure that can hold its own with any team not located in the northeastern part of Ohio or Florida. Even Chicago’s trip to the Super Bowl 10 years ago is remembered as a punchline thanks to that team being quarterbacked by Rex Grossman. The Bears can’t even win in the few occurrences in which they win.

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The hiring of John Fox 22 months ago was supposed to be what transformed the Bears from a consistent loser to a semi-regular winner. He came to Chicago with a 119-89 career record, with six seasons of 11 wins or greater in 13 years in the NFL and both an AFC and NFC conference title to his credit. The Bears had tried a bold approach in plucking Marc Trestman from the CFL, but he quickly proved to be in over his head or at least in over his glasses. So while Fox’s installment promised no revolutionary offense, there was hope of some 10-6 or 11-5 excitement in the near future. But currently the Bears are 2-9, well off the pace of Fox’s 6-10 debut last year, tied with the Jaguars for the third-worst record in the NFL behind only the Browns and 49ers. Even Trestman’s worst season finished at 5-11. And it’s been a disaster from the start for Fox. In his introductory press conference two Januarys ago, he said of Cutler: “I’m looking forward to getting to know Jake. I’m looking forward to seeing Jake face-to-face, and we’re going to start that relationship and that process.”

In Fox’s defense, maybe he was trying to convince himself that his quarterback was an unknown quantity named Jake Cutler, a guy who could develop into a winner, and not Jay Cutler, the long-established mediocrity and 33 year-old turnover machine who has maintained employment in the NFL for 11 years simply because he can throw a football very hard and that skill impresses certain personnel departments more than actual production. Recall that Fox went 7-4 with Tim Tebow as his quarterback in 2011 and won a playoff game. He almost won a Super Bowl with Jake Delhomme in Carolina. Yet with Jay-not-Jake Cutler as his starting quarterback, he’s 7-13, and that’s even with the sullen one having one of his better NFL seasons a year ago.

If only subpar quarterback play was Fox’s biggest problem. Despite playing in a division in which 9-7 or 10-6 can win, the Bears don’t have the talent to do even that. There’s not an impact player on either side of the ball. Every unit – from offensive line to special teams – is average or worse. The first three picks of GM Ryan Pace’s first draft in 2015– Kevin White, Eddie Goldman and Hroniss Grasu – have all struggled with injuries and White’s planned receiving partner, Alshon Jeffery, is suspended for PEDs. Leonard Floyd, the 2016 first-round pick, has shown promise with five sacks in eight games, but his addition hasn’t much improved a unit that also added fellow linebacker Danny Trevathan for four years and $28m.

Defense is supposed to be the backbone of Fox-coached teams but the defense was unable to slow a second-year quarterback in Marcus Mariota who was playing on the road on Sunday. And Chicago’s D is getting worse, yielding 85 points over the current three-game losing streak, worse than their performance in either of Chicago’s previous three-game losing streaks. (Yes, the Bears have three different three-game losing streaks this season. See? Consistent!) They’ll likely get worse still now that Trevathan is out for the season with a knee injury, becoming the 15th Bears player on injured reserve.

The New York Giants and Pittsburgh Steelers, two other NFL franchises with blue blood ownership like the Bears, are lauded for their steady-handed approach to coaches and quarterbacks. But while the Steelers and Giants have won four Super Bowl titles between them in the last decade, the Bears are proof that consistency only works if you have, you know ... good quarterbacks and coaches. Cutler is not Roethlisberger. He’s not even Eli Manning on Eli’s Bad Eli days. Nor do the Bears have any players like Antonio Brown or Odell Beckham or Le’Veon Bell or Landon Collins. That fact will probably buy Fox at least another season on the job and it will likely be a season without Cutler, who no longer has any guaranteed money left on the insane seven-year, $126m deal a previous regime gave him at the end of the 2014 season. The Bears are currently on pace to draft third or fourth in April and could move up to second if they manage to lose to the 49ers on Sunday. Deshaun Watson, DeShone Kizer or Mitch Trubisky would be available there and could become the first quarterback taken by the Bears with their first pick since Cade McNown at the end of the last century.

As bleak as things seem for the Bears now, maybe this is rock bottom. Maybe next year they have better luck with injuries, Fox’s defense finally gets rolling and a QB like Watson pulls off a solid recreation of Dak Prescott’s rookie campaign, making the Bears instant contenders in the NFC North. Or they could go the other way and keep plugging away with Cutler, confident he’ll reach his long-rumored potential as he nears 40, and finish last again in one of the NFL’s weakest divisions. With the Cubs World Series champions, Chicago fans need a new team to make them miserable and the Bears are already more than a quarter of the way to a new 108-year championship drought. It would be a shame to blow the streak now.

