Chicago Bears 2026: The Coverage Report — 48 Cutdown Calls, Zero of Them Graded
One post per club, after cutdowns, on how the outlets MissedTakes tracks handled a team — measured against what actually happened. One caveat up front, said once and meant throughout: this measures the sources we ingest and grade, not all of football media. A quiet file here means our tracked sources were quiet, not that Chicago went uncovered.
The coverage baseline: middle of the pack, and thinner once you grade it
We hold 574 takes about the Chicago Bears. That is 18th among the 32 clubs by raw volume — behind Buffalo's 999, the Rams' 866 and Philadelphia's 861, ahead of Detroit (543), Minnesota (486) and Atlanta (323).
Graded is where it thins. Only 172 of those 574 Bears takes carry a grade, which ranks 23rd in the league. The median club has 207 graded takes; Kansas City has 389. So roughly seven in ten things said about the Bears in our database are still unsettled — mostly because they were said in the last few months about a season that has not been played.
That gap matters more here than it would for a bad team, because the Bears gave the field plenty to be wrong about. Chicago went 11-6 in 2025 and made the playoffs under head coach Ben Johnson, after 5-12 in 2024 and 7-10 in 2023. Two winning seasons in the previous ten years of records we hold (2018 and 2020). A team that swings 5-12 to 11-6 is the exact case where graded punditry earns its keep, and we have a middling amount of it.
The cutdown: 48 calls, none of them graded
The news hook of this series is the 53-man roster. We hold 48 roster-spot calls on the Bears, and not one of them has been graded. There are no surprises to lead with, no consensus locks caught getting cut, no reverse. The site's roster-spot file league-wide is only 49 graded calls, and none belong to Chicago. Until the grades land, this section is a description of what was claimed, not a scoreboard.
What was claimed is heavily concentrated. Thirty of the 48 Bears roster-spot calls come from one writer, Mike Moraitis, who has no pundit page on the site — mostly lists of "locks": Jaylon Johnson, Tyrique Stevenson, Malik Muhammad and Josh Blackwell at corner; Montez Sweat, Dayo Odeyingbo, Austin Booker and Daniel Hardy on the edge; Gervon Dexter Sr., Grady Jarrett, Neville Gallimore and Jordan van den Berg inside. Calling a starter a lock is a low bar, and the grading will treat it that way.
The interesting entries are the disagreements. On August 9, Pete Martuneac named four Bears as likely cuts — Theo Benedet, Roschon Johnson, Ruben Hyppolite II and Tyrique Stevenson — writing of the tackle that "if he's now getting reps over Benedet, I think the former undrafted free agent has one foot firmly out the door." Nineteen days later, Jerry Markarian took the opposite side: "Bears offensive tackle Theo Benedet is not fighting for a roster spot. The Canadian Eagle has long been favored as the team's top option at swing tackle." Same player, opposite calls, both still pending.
Two others worth flagging for when grades arrive. Albert Breer came out of camp on van den Berg — the sixth-round pick "seems to have already earned himself a role on the defensive front." And an NFL.com cutdown-day list, logged here under Tom Jensen, put Cole Kmet among the players it expected to be released. That one is a real limb; nobody else in our Bears file went near it.
What the graded record does show
Strip out the pending and the Bears' 172 graded takes cluster in two places: game picks and mock drafts.
The pattern across the graded kinds is consistent. The field was right about the shape of the Bears' season and wrong about the individual Sundays. Season-outlook calls — playoff berths (13 graded, 84.6 average accuracy), division winners (5 graded, all correct, average skill delta 165.6) — score far above the naive baseline, because the naive pick in the NFC North was Detroit. Week-to-week game picks are the biggest bucket at 50 graded and only 66.0 average accuracy, with a skill delta of 4.1: a lot of people took Chicago and got no credit for it.
Where the field was collectively short was the win total. Twelve tracked 2025 win-total calls on the Bears averaged 9.0 wins against an actual 11. Only two landed the number: Chris Brockman in May ("you're talking about eleven, twelve win season there," graded 100, skill +170) and Andrew Santino, whose May 11-6 call was read back on air in September (100 accuracy, +160.65). The low man was Brady Quinn at 5-12: "that bears even with the addition of Ben Johnson still struggle a bit at five and twelve." Graded 0.
Kyle Brandt has the cleanest Bears call in the file — the NFC North, twice, in early September, against a naive Detroit pick, +200 skill each time. Colin Cowherd kept putting Chicago in the wild-card field from March onward and kept getting graded 100. On the fantasy side, Scott Bogman called Caleb Williams a QB1 value in June and Williams finished QB5; Sean Kerner had Colston Loveland at a late-TE1 price and he finished TE9; Chris Raybon said don't sleep on D'Andre Swift, who finished RB14.
The worst Bears take we hold is John Middlekauff in September 2025: "worst case scenario, Kayleb Williams is a bust." Williams' best finish through two seasons is QB5 in 2025; the call needed him to miss QB9. Graded 0, skill −194.
Who has earned a named record on this team
Eight pundits clear our five-graded-take floor on the Bears. That is a small enough field that these are records, not rankings — nobody here has the sample to be called Chicago's best or worst analyst.
Nick Wright has the most graded Bears takes at 18 (79.5 accuracy), Cowherd 16 (70.4), Brockman 13 (69.3, and the best skill delta of the group at +87.3). Gregg Rosenthal grades highest on accuracy at 83.3 on seven takes — including Bears −3 over Cincinnati, "coaching mismatch," which came in 47-42. Pat Fitzmaurice is the only one of the eight below the naive baseline (41.4 accuracy, −43.2 skill on five graded), though he was one of two — with Andrew Erickson — correctly fading DJ Moore, who finished WR27 against a WR22 bar.
The honest summary: our Bears file is average-sized, below-average graded, and its single largest current section — the 48 cutdown calls — is entirely unsettled. Check back when the roster-spot grades land. Methodology is here.