The Chicago Bears put a whooping on the Jacksonville Jaguars, leaving the team feeling down bad in the worst kind of way.
In a postgame interview with Action Sports JAX, Jaguars safety Andre Cisco sounded off to a reporter shortly after the team’s 35-16 loss to the Bears at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London:
“It was really bad. I just felt like it was, how should I say this? … A lot of quit. In a situation like that, you can feel when we’re playing as one or when we’re not. I felt very early in the game, may at halftime, that we weren’t playing as one.”
Wow. That quote is equal parts telling and damning.
I think the Bears broke the Jaguars’ spirit
As someone who has watched some ugly Bears teams quit, I’m familiar with what it looks like when a team collectively puts the sticks down. And I’ve gotta say what we saw from the Jaguars after the Bears scored their first touchdown is precisely what it looks like. Jacksonville looked like a team going through the motions. Previous iterations of Chicago’s football team would’ve let the Jaguars hang around. Some versions would’ve even let the Jags off the hook and watched them win the game outright. But these Bears are different. These Bears took over that game and never relinquished it.
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And in the end, it leaves the Jaguars with a 1-5 record and their head coach talking about changing the culture:
“We play a 17-game schedule, so we’ve got a few more games left,” Pederson said after the loss to the Bears, via ESPN’s Michael DiRocco. “Nobody’s going to feel sorry for us. We’ve got to change. I say we — it’s all of us, coaches, players, everybody. We’ve got to change right now that culture.
“Otherwise, it just gets out of control. We’re on a slippery slope, or right on the cusp of that slope. At some point we’ve got to [say] enough is enough, and you’ve got to have enough pride and figure out a way.”
It is never a good sign to hear your team’s players talking about playing for the guy next to them and coaches offering up the need for culture change. The Jaguars are staying in London for their next game. But I’m not sure how much longer that thing will keep rolling before the wheels fall off. And to think, losing to the Bears might be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.