Robert Tonyan is used to being the favorite in his division.
In the five seasons he played tight end with the Packers, they won the NFC North three times. They beat the Bears nine times out of 10, went 5-5 against the Lions and 5-4-1 against the Vikings. Quarterback Aaron Rodgers won two MVPs.
But Rodgers is gone and Tonyan is a Bear. The division is there for the taking, he said, for all four teams.
“It’s wide open,” Tonyan said this week after a mandatory minicamp practice. “That’s the best part. Everyone is young. Everyone is new. You have good players on every team. That’s the thing — there is no favorite. And it’s wide open. And that’s exactly where you want to be.”
It’s more open for the NFC North’s other three teams that it is for the Bears, who have the longest odds to win the division. The Lions are the favorites, followed by the Vikings and Packers.
The distance between the four teams’ odds, though, is smaller than any other -division.
“Overlooked, underrated, whatever you want to call it,” Tonyan said of the Bears. “But they’ve still got to step on the field because they’ve got to see us. I’m excited.”
The Bears have hope — not just because of Rodgers forcing his way to the Jets via trade but because of what they hope will be an emergent season from quarterback Justin Fields. Fields establishing himself as the team’s quarterback of the present — and future —would give the Bears an edge they haven’t had since before Fields was born. As long as Brett Favre and Rodgers played for the Packers, they could claim they had the best quarterback in the division.
That’s no longer the case. Packers quarterback Jordan Love has started exactly one game in three years. The Vikings’ Kirk Cousins, who turns 35 in August, is entering the last year of his contract. Jared Goff is solid but is under Lions control for two more seasons.
The Bears will examine those quarterbacks and their teammates — and what has changed on each squad since last season — when their coaches and front-office staff work on their summer scouting reports in the coming weeks.
“We always look at personnel — the personnel changes, the acquisitions that they had, the strengths and weaknesses of each guy that we face,” Bears coach Matt Eberflus said. “Then we’ll start scheming up those guys going into the summer. We’ll maybe do some periods in training camp that reflect that in a certain division.”
The Vikings, who somehow went 13-4 last year despite scoring three fewer points than their opponents, have started a soft rebuild. They cut running back Dalvin Cook earlier this month and saved $9 million against this year’s salary cap. They dealt three-time Pro Bowl edge rusher Za’Darius Smith to the Browns last month and got two fifth-round picks in return. They released Adam Thielen, who ranks fourth in franchise history in receiving yards, and linebacker Eric Kendricks.
The Lions, who missed the playoffs by one game, revamped their backfield with former Bears standout David Montgomery and first-round pick Jahmyr Gibbs. No team allowed more yards than the Lions, so they signed safety C.J. Gardner-Johnson, Cameron Sutton and Emmanuel Moseley to bol ster the defensive backfield.
And then there are the Packers, who replaced one of the most irreplaceable quarterbacks of all time with Love, who threw fewer passes than Bears third-stringer Nathan Peterman. Their biggest free-agent additions came when they re-signed two of their players: offensive lineman Elgton Jenkins in December and returner Keisean Nixon in March. They used their first-round pick on Iowa defensive end Lukas Van Ness. The Barrington alum never started a game in college.
There’s not a single can’t-miss team in the bunch, then.
The Bears have young players who want to win after posting the worst record in the NFL last year, Tonyan said. No one signs up to go 3-14.
Unless someone runs off with the NFC North, the Bears have hope. So do the three other teams in the division.
“Winning is awesome,” Tonyan said. -“Going to the playoffs is different. Winning the division is a great feeling. And I hopefully want to bring that feeling here.”
