The Chicago Bears find themselves at a crossroads. Head coach Ben Johnson recently described the team as "at the bottom again," but that label doesn't quite fit. Expectations are rising in Chicago, and "improvement" alone won't cut it anymore. The Bears need to win consistently—and that starts with a defense that has struggled to keep pace with the league's elite. So, what does a winning defense actually look like? How do contenders build theirs, and how far are the Bears from joining that club?

To answer that, we took a hard look at the NFL's best defenses from 2022 to 2025—the years since Ryan Poles took over as Chicago's general manager. Our focus: teams that won at least 10 regular-season games and backed it up with a playoff victory. That narrows the field to 27 team-seasons over four years. The Buffalo Bills, for example, made the cut four times, while the Washington Commanders only snuck in once.

But not every player on those rosters mattered equally. A second-round pick who barely saw the field? He doesn't count here. For this analysis, we only included players who logged at least 50% of their team's regular-season snaps or ranked among the top snap-getters at their position—think top four or five defensive linemen, top two linebackers, or top four defensive backs. In practice, meeting one threshold usually meant meeting the other.

So where does that leave Chicago? The Bears lack the high-end talent that defines most contending defenses. But the gap isn't as wide as it might seem. With the right pieces and a clear blueprint, this defense could be closer to success than the record suggests. The question is whether they can find those pieces—and fast.