South Side Sports Roundup October 9th, 2025

While preseason high hopes haven’t entirely been dashed, it’s been a rocky start to the tenure of coach Ben Johnson and his new-look Chicago Bears offense. The team will enter their game next Monday night with an even 2-2 record after a narrow escape from disaster against the Las Vegas Raiders on September 28. 

The Monsters of the Midway were on the verge of falling to 1-3 on the season, all but a death knell for any fledgling playoff hopes, when a blocked Raiders field goal attempt with 38 seconds remaining preserved a 25-24 win. Calling it a “huge character win” for the team, Johnson has made no bones about the team’s need for substantial improvement.

“The most important thing that we’re looking at as a staff and as players is: how do we get better with some of our fundamentals?” Johnson said to media members after last week’s game. “We’re not shedding blocks to the degree we’d like to yet, or at least as consistently as we’d like to yet. And we’re not making tackles in space as well as we’re capable of. We did enough live tackling over the course of training camp, I thought we’d be a little further along in that regard in the first four games. [We’re] still a work in progress.”

The team’s previous win inspired considerably more confidence and saw second-year quarterback Caleb Williams earn NFC Offensive Player of the Week honors for tossing 298 yards and four touchdowns in a dominant 31-14 win against the Dallas Cowboys. Williams enters Week 6 with 927 total passing yards and eight touchdowns to just two interceptions as he continues his quest to become the first Bears quarterback to ever cross the threshold of 4000 yards or 30 touchdown passes in a season. While Johnson has cited a need for improvement in the team’s rushing offense and defense, Williams is largely living up to most measured expectations.

The Bears play on Monday Night Football next week against the Washington Commanders as they seek to avenge perhaps their most infamous loss in recent memory. Chicago had what would have been their fifth victory of the 2024 campaign all but sealed away when a seemingly-impossible Hail Mary pass from Washington QB Jayden Daniels found the endzone as time expired, sparking a 10-game Bears losing streak and becoming perhaps the defining moment of former coach Matt Eberflus’s tenure with the team. At 3-2 and coming off a surprise run to last year’s NFC Championship game, this year’s Commanders squad will be an excellent litmus test for whether Johnson’s new-look Bears are ready for prime time or not. 

For most MLB teams, losing 102 games could hardly be more than a pure nadir; a catastrophic failure of a season almost certain to lead to high-level firings, organizational overhaul, and broad existential self-reflection. 

On the South Side, that’s not quite the case. The White Sox final record of 60-102 marked their third consecutive hundred-loss campaign, and the third-most losses in their 125-year history. It also marked a 19-win improvement over their record-setting 121-loss effort in 2024 and included a crop of promising performances and rookie debuts offering a glimpse at what a better future for the team could contain.

Few Sox rookies in recent memory have left a mark as strong as 23-year-old shortstop Colson Montgomery, whose 21 home runs after July 21 ranked second in all of baseball, or 25-year-old starter Shane Smith, who paced Sox pitchers with 29 starts, 146 innings, and a 3.81 ERA. Catchers Kyle Teel and Edgar Quero are likely to receive a smattering of down-ballot Rookie of the Year votes. After struggling early in their careers, infielders Lenyn Sosa and Miguel Vargas looked the part of average big leaguers in 2025, the former leading the offense with 22 home runs and the latter with 50 extra-base hits. 

The team also announced numerous coaching changes as the season wrapped up. Longtime pitching coach Ethan Katz, who just completed his fifth season with the team, will not return in 2026, nor will four other members of the coaching staff as manager Will Venable and GM Chris Getz will reshape the team’s makeup in their own image as they enter their second and third full seasons at the helm, respectively. A new era has begun in South Side baseball, but how long it will take to bear fruit remains to be seen.  

Expectations for the White Sox were low from the outset, but the same can’t be said for the Chicago Sky, who concluded arguably the worst season in the history of the franchise with a four-game losing streak last month. Their 10-34 record was tied for the worst in the 13-team WNBA, and having already traded the rights to their next draft pick, no immediate help is on the way. 

Needless to say, fans are uneasy. When asked where he felt the team’s issues began, South Shore native and longtime fan Jalen Jackson pointed the finger at “leadership,” calling back to the organization’s surprising decision to dismiss head coach Teresa Weatherspoon following the 2024 season, mere months after hiring her with much fanfare. A year later, the franchise is even worse off than before, though unlike his predecessor, coach Tyler Marsh will receive at least one more year to steer things in the right direction.

“I don’t know how they fix it besides finding veteran leadership on the court or changing the culture overall from above,” Jackson told the Weekly. “Right now they have no real direction… just playing basketball game by game and relying on Angel [Reese] to bail them out.”

Despite a slow start, the 23-year-old Reese had a strong follow-up to a record-setting rookie season, increasing her scoring average to a team-high 14.7 points per game while also leading the Sky with 3.7 assists per contest. With rumblings already being felt that Reese may choose to take her talents elsewhere if the Sky can’t put a more competitive team on the floor soon, the clock is ticking for Marsh and lead executive Jeff Pagliocca to turn things around before yet another rebuild becomes necessary.