Chicago Broke Out. Now Fantasy Managers Have to Decide How Much of It Was Real.

The Chicago Bears spent 2025 behaving like a team in a sports movie.

They started 0–2.

Then they won the NFC North.

They kept falling behind late and somehow winning anyway.

They erased an 18-point halftime deficit against Green Bay in the playoffs.

For one season, Chicago football became genuinely entertaining, which may have violated several local ordinances.

Naturally, fantasy managers responded the way we always do.

More, please.

Colston Loveland is being drafted TE3.

Luther Burden is WR23.

Caleb Williams is QB7.

The AutoDraftYears model has a considerably less festive interpretation.

Chicago scored 25.7 offensive points per game in our 2025 data.

The 2026 projection?

21.4.

That's the real Bears question this year:

Was 2025 the beginning of something—or are we drafting as though an unusually good season has already become normal?

2025: The Bears actually arrived

Let's give Chicago its moment first.

Ben Johnson's first season was an enormous success.

The Bears finished 11–6 and won the NFC North, one year after going 5–12. They reached the postseason for just the third time in 15 years and eventually won their first playoff game since the 2010 season.

And they weren't simply surviving behind the defense.

The offense changed.

Pro Football Reference credits Chicago with 441 total points, 25.9 per game, ninth in the NFL. The slight difference from AutoDraftYears' 25.7 figure comes from how team versus offensive scoring is classified, but either way the point is the same:

This was nothing like the offense we had been watching.

Caleb Williams threw for 3,942 yards, breaking the Bears' single-season franchise record, with 27 touchdowns and only seven interceptions. He added another 388 yards and three scores on the ground.

D'Andre Swift rushed for 1,087 yards at 4.9 per carry.

Loveland immediately looked like a real NFL weapon: 58 catches, 713 yards and six touchdowns as a rookie.

Burden added 47 catches for 652 yards, despite starting only five games.

Rome Odunze had 661 yards and six touchdowns in only 12 games.

So no, the optimism isn't imaginary.

These young players did things.

That's what makes the pricing question interesting.

But 2025 also came with something difficult to project forward:

magic.

Chicago won seven games in which it trailed during the final two minutes of regulation. Then, in the Wild Card round, it trailed Green Bay 21–3 at halftime and 21–6 entering the fourth before winning 31–27.

Caleb Williams became Captain Fourth Quarter.

Every Sunday apparently required defibrillator access.

That's fun.

It is not necessarily a repeatable offensive statistic.

And Williams' season wasn't flawless beneath the heroics. He completed only 58.1% of his passes, and NFL.com noted this offseason that his completion percentage over expectation was the worst among qualifying quarterbacks.

The Bears improved enormously.

The question is how much of that improvement should become our 2026 baseline.

Then Chicago traded D.J. Moore

This is where the offseason gets interesting.

Chicago sent D.J. Moore and a fifth-round pick to Buffalo for a second-round pick in March.

Moore wasn't the same fantasy force last season—he finished with career lows of 50 catches and 682 yards—but he still played 17 games and scored six touchdowns.

His departure clears the runway for Odunze and Burden while pushing even more of the receiving offense toward Chicago's young players.

This is where fantasy managers begin whispering the sacred phrase:

Vacated targets.

Vacated targets are wonderful because they sound like an inheritance.

D.J. Moore leaves town and somewhere Luther Burden receives a certified letter informing him that 92 targets and a lake house now belong to him.

Unfortunately, offenses don't work that neatly.

More opportunity?

Absolutely.

Automatic fantasy profit?

Different question.

What the model thinks happens next

AutoDraftYears expects a meaningful step backward:

The pass rate barely changes.

The bigger issue is volume.

Chicago ran 65 plays per game last season.

The model expects 60.6.

That's more than four opportunities disappearing every Sunday.

Fewer carries.

Fewer targets.

Fewer red-zone chances.

Fewer occasions for the entire offense to stage a two-minute action movie.

And the resulting positional environments are ugly:

Running back is the strongest environment.

It ranks 17th.

Someone has won employee of the month at the DMV.

Historical comps tell a similar story.

The 30 offenses most similar to Chicago's 2026 forecast averaged only 2.4 fantasy starters, below the 2.6 average across all 320 team-seasons in the AutoDraftYears sample.

Bear case: 2.

Base case: 2.

Bull case: 3.

This does not look like an offense where I want to pay premium prices for four different players.

The strange part: the Bears themselves aren't overpriced

At the team level, the market gets Chicago exactly right.

Market roster rank: 16th.

Model roster rank: 14th.

Two places.

The market isn't excessively bullish on the Bears.

It's excessively bullish on specific Bears.

Market and Model are ranks within the position. Edge is the model's position rank against the market's, after removing the drift that affects every player at that price — so it reads as “the model likes him this many places more than it likes the typical player who costs this much.” A call needs the edge to clear the position's bar (QB 5, RB 15, WR 11, TE 5 places), set at two-thirds of that position's own spread.

This is what makes Chicago useful.

I don't need a grand proclamation that the Bears are overrated.

They're not.

I just need to stop paying breakout prices for players whose breakouts are still being projected.

Loveland is priced like Year 2 already happened

I understand the excitement.

Loveland's rookie year was excellent.

He finished with 713 yards, then went nuclear in the playoffs with eight catches for 137 yards against Green Bay. Across Chicago's two postseason games, he produced 198 receiving yards.

Of course people want more.

The problem is they are paying for more before receiving it.

Loveland costs roughly pick 43 as TE3.

The model has him TE14.

Adjusted edge: -11.

His Role Score is 81.

Risk is Low.

This is not the model saying Loveland is bad.

It's saying:

Why am I paying TE3 prices in the 27th-ranked TE environment?

Fantasy managers love young tight ends because they combine two of our favorite things:

Talent and the absence of disappointing history.

But pick 43 isn't an optimism pick.

That's a mortgage.

Burden is an even easier fade

Burden's rookie season gave us plenty to dream about.

He averaged 13.9 yards per reception, finished third among rookie receivers with 652 yards and closed the regular season with 138 yards against San Francisco.

Now Moore is gone.

Here comes the breakout, right?

Maybe.

The market is charging as though it already happened.

Burden goes WR23.

The model has him WR36.

Adjusted edge: -18.

His Role Score is only 62, and Chicago's WR environment ranks 27th.

That is too much projection baked into one price.

More targets are likely.

But Burden does not inherit Moore's fantasy points like an aunt's vacation condo.

At WR36?

I'm interested.

At WR23?

Someone else can enjoy the upside presentation.

Caleb is the Bear I'm most comfortable drafting

Williams is different because 2025 actually gave us the leap.

Nearly 4,000 passing yards.

27 touchdowns.

Seven interceptions.

Multiple absurd late-game escapes.

He's now entering Year 2 in Ben Johnson's offense rather than learning a new system again.

The market has him QB7.

The model says QB9.

That's close enough for me.

His adjusted edge is actually +7, right around the model's actionable threshold, although the page stops short of formally labeling him a buy.

I wouldn't chase him because Chicago is exciting.

But if I want Williams around market price, I'm comfortable doing it.

He has already demonstrated considerably more than the two players being drafted at premium breakout prices.

Everyone else is boring, which is healthy

Swift?

RB24 market.

RB25 model.

Fine.

Odunze?

WR28 market.

WR27 model.

Also fine.

Fantasy analysis occasionally needs to acknowledge that a player can simply have an appropriate price.

No podcast emergency required.

The Bears don't have a team-level value problem.

They have two enthusiasm problems.

Loveland.

Burden.

What would prove the model wrong?

Chicago could simply keep being this good.

That would settle things quickly.

The model expects scoring to fall from 25.7 to 21.4 and offensive volume from 65.0 snaps to 60.6.

If Ben Johnson keeps the Bears operating near last year's pace, then the environment changes substantially.

And that's why my September number isn't Caleb's passing yards.

It's plays per game.

If Chicago is still around 64 or 65?

I'll start buying that 2025 established a new baseline.

If they're around 60?

Then suddenly there aren't enough touches and targets to support every exciting young player's price.

That's when August optimism receives its quarterly performance review.

So how should we draft Chicago?

Don't fade the Bears.

Fade the assumption that everything good about 2025 automatically grows in 2026.

Williams is fine.

Swift is fine.

Odunze is fine.

Loveland at TE3 is not.

Burden at WR23 is even harder for me to justify.

Chicago's 2025 breakthrough was real. The young talent is real. Ben Johnson's offense is real.

The question is whether fantasy managers are paying for another developmental step before it happens.

That's where I get uncomfortable.

Fantasy football has a wonderful habit of turning improvement into identity.

The Bears were fun last season.

Now we're paying as though fun is permanent.

History tends to send an invoice for that.

Sources: Auto Draft Years FF Model workbook — Team Data By Year, Team Stat Ranking, 2026 Team Context; Auto Draft Years 2026 consensus board (16 authoritative market sources); Player outcomes 2016–2025, Pro Football Reference via the project dataset. Team environment grades, forecasts and player model ranks are proprietary. Every figure on this page is generated from the dataset at build time; none is typed in by hand.