Move Over World Series, The Bears And Bengals Are Playing

You can take your World Series and push it up your tush. The NFL delivers excitement similar to that of the high-stakes, edge-of-your-seat extra-inning baseball the Blue Jays and Dodgers gave us last week. To see the heroics of Shohei Ohtani or Yoshinobu Yamamoto or even Miguel Rojas, you have to stay up late or risk missing out something incredible (with Ray Ratto deservedly putting salt on your wound). But to see the heroics of Caleb Williams or Joe Flacco, you just need to have a free Sunday afternoon. The Bears and Bengals played a funny, fascinating, fantastic game. Next up: Dinner. Deep dish pizza, maybe.

Now let me yell at you: What were you possibly doing that you didn’t watch a Week 9 football game between two crap teams on a Sunday afternoon? It is no excuse that the game aired mostly in states that border the Great Lakes. The Bears' 47-42 win over the Bengals was tremendous.

I get it doesn’t have everything the World Series might. The game was not played in a world city like Los Angeles or Toronto. It was not even played in Chicago, a city best known for the time that the Dave Matthews Band tour bus dropped a bunch of feces on tourists attempting to take a photo of theYankee Hotel Foxtrot album cover. But Cincinnati was a filming location for the 1993 film Airborne, and its free art museum has a really good Picasso (Still Life with Glass and Lemon).

The Bears were the up-and-coming team with a young QB. The Bengals had a 40-year-old man who had a 60.3 QB rating for an even more pathetic franchise earlier this season. There wasn’t much on the line when the teams met in Cincinnati Sunday afternoon, making it even more impressive that the teams delivered the kind of classic moments guys like Bo Bichette were providing us a day earlier.

The teams played a funny, fantastic, fascinating game that seemed over multiple times but wasn’t until a failed Hail Mary with no time left. The Bears scored last, when Caleb Williams hit Colston Loveland for a 58-yard touchdown pass with 17 seconds left. Joe Flacco, the aforementioned 40-year-old, threw four touchdowns and a career-high 470 yards. Williams had three TDs and caught another. Bears RB Kyle Monangai ran for 176 yards; he had 186 career rushing yards coming into the game. Loveland, another rookie, had six catches for 118 yards. Tee Higgins had 121 yards and Ja’Marr Chase had 111. The Bengals scored 15 points in less than a minute before giving up Loveland’s touchdown. The final was Bears 47, Bengals 42, and fans of these two cursed franchises got to experience multiple moments of incredible joy and frustration in just one game. Also: The Bengals successfully challenged a play, and the result was a Bears touchdown.

The game was a roarin’ good time from the start. Charlie Jones returned the game’s opening kickoff 98 yards. The only Bear who had a shot at him was the kicker. Bears coach Ben Johnson, clearly still spooked two days after Halloween, immediately resorted to trickery. A hundred seconds into the game, TE Cole Kmet took the snap under center, pitched it to Williams, who then threw it backwards to Kmet. His pass to Rome Odunze was ruled incomplete after a Bears challenge. It didn’t stop the trickery, though. Johnson ran a more conventional trick play this time: On fourth down at the 2, Williams caught a touchdown from D.J. Moore on a Philly Special variant called “Hot Potato.” Earlier in the drive, this was the end result of a play.

The teams traded the lead throughout a lively first half—the Bengals led 20-17 after 20 minutes—and continued it into the third quarter. Williams found Loveland for a score. Then Flacco hit Higgins for his second score of the day. Need a feel good story? Brittain Brown, who last played for the Raiders in 2022, lined up in the backfield a day after the Bears activated him from the practice squad. He rushed for a 22-yard touchdown on his third NFL carry.

The Bears took control after a Flacco fumble, his first turnover in a Bengals uniform after throwing six picks in Cleveland. Chicago immediately ran a play where Williams caught a 20-yard pass from backup QB Tyson Bagent. It was 34-27 when Cincinnati provided the viewer with a half hour of Emmy-worthy comedy. Down seven, the Bengals took six minutes on a drive that ended with an intentional grounding penalty and a missed field goal. The next play, Monangai ran for 39 yards. Moore then took an end-around to the 1, fumbling out of bounds as he stretched for the pylon. Zac Taylor challenged, looking for refs to rule the ball went out the side of the end zone for a touchback. The call was overturned to a touchdown for Chicago.

That put the Bears up 14. Flacco drove the Bengals into the red zone, but threw a pick that Kevin Byard returned 90 yards. That came back for pass interference, so the Bears just did it again: Two plays later, Tremaine Edmunds took an interception 96 yards for a score. That pick stood, but officials ruled on replay that Edmunds was down at the 4. No matter. The Bears ran into the line three times and the Bengals called timeouts, but this one was over with 2:24 to play.

Then it was time for something no baseball team has had since Audubon High School in the early 2000s: Joe Flacco Magic. Flacco hit four passes in a row, the last of them a TD to Noah Fant. He then hit Tee Higgins for a two-point conversion. His good vibes spread. Nobody recovers onside kicks anymore. The Bengals did. Flacco had them in the end zone 49 seconds later. They were ahead. Flacco has won 107 games and an MVP and a Super Bowl MVP and the NFL’s most handsome man award. His 470 yards Sunday were by far the most in his career.

But the Bears kicked out of Flacco Magic. Williams found Loveland upfield for a 58-yard touchdown with 17 seconds left that was aided by nobody on the Bengals’ defense being able to tackle, and gave the Bears the improbable win after almost allowing an embarrassing comeback.

Flacco did get one last shot, and was about as short on a Hail Mary as I can remember.

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