South Side Sports Roundup January 15, 2025

It was the kind of victory that captured the attention of the entire city and will surely remain as one of the monumental games in the history of the 105-year-old franchise.

The nature of the 31-27 win would have been dramatic under any circumstances, but to do so against the Green Bay Packers—the city’s most storied sports rival, and one that has utterly dominated the Bears for fifteen years—made it a moment that few Chicago sports fans will ever forget.

Despite an NFC North championship that defied preseason expectations, many fans’ hopes entering the playoffs were tempered. The Bears had lost two consecutive games to finish the season, and while their dramatic overtime win against the Packers three weeks ago was nothing short of a movie, the shadow of Green Bay’s utter dominance over the preceding decade loomed large. Having suffered sixteen defeats in seventeen  tries between 2016 and 2024, Bears fans can hardly be blamed for their lack of faith when the Packers raced out to a 21-3 halftime lead, with their offense stalling out and the defense seeming simply inept. 

“I was banished from my table with my friends for bad vibes,” said lifelong fan and Beverly native Tim Dunleavy, twenty-nine, who watched the game with friends and family at Rebel and Rye in the Fulton Market neighborhood. Some fans reported turning the game off at the midway point, with the team’s dismal first half performance sapping nearly all hope for a comeback. This season the Bears had won an improbable six games in which they trailed in the last two minutes of play, but it seemed their clutch luck had finally run out.

Despite allowing touchdowns on three consecutive drives to start the game, the Bears’ defense came out of halftime with a vengeance, holding the Packers offense scoreless until midway through the fourth quarter. At the same time, quarterback Caleb Williams and head coach Ben Johnson’s offense turned on the jets just in the nick of time, putting up 13 unanswered points to cut the deficit to 21-16 with just over ten minutes to play. 

Hope faltered when the Packers finally responded with a touchdown of their own, bringing Green Bay’s lead back to 11 with six minutes to play. With barely six minutes remaining, ESPN analytics gave the Bears just a 4.4% chance of winning the game. Nothing short of a miracle was needed to keep the 2025 football season going in Chicago.

As it turns out, miracles do happen. Williams, who finished with a Bears’ playoff record 361 passing yards and three touchdowns, answered the challenge when the pressure was highest, keeping the game alive with a simply unbelievable fourth-down conversion pass and quickly following it with a 23-yard touchdown pass to cut the deficit to five points. After yet another clutch stop from the defense, the game was in Williams’ hands with less than three minutes remaining. Incredibly, he delivered, engineering a 66-yard drive, concluding with a touchdown pass to D.J. Moore that gave the Bears their first lead of the game at 31-27. One more stop from the Bears’ defense made that the final score, their first playoff victory in nearly fifteen years.

This unfathomably dramatic victory now leaves the Bears a mere two wins away from one of the most improbable Super Bowl appearances in recent memory. Their next obstacle comes in the form of the Los Angeles Rams, who will play at Soldier Field this Sunday at 5:30pm with an NFC Championship appearance on the line. No matter the outcome, it’s been one of the most memorable football seasons in this city’s long sports history. We look forward to giving you all the details moving forward.

Strokes of luck have been few and far between for the White Sox in recent years, but one finally landed last week in the form of MLB’s draft lottery, which saw the Pale Hose awarded the first overall pick in the coming spring’s draft. It’s just the second time in the last fifty years that the Sox have had the pick of the litter; they made future Hall of Famer and team icon Harold Baines the top choice in 1977. It’s just the third time in franchise history that the White Sox have had the pick of the litter and first in forty-nine years, when they selected Hall of Fame inductee Harold Baines with the top choice in the 1997 draft. 

The 2026 MLB draft is considered deep, and the Sox are expected to be able to find a franchise cornerstone among this year’s crop of top picks. The preseason favorite to land at the top of the draft is UCLA shortstop Roch Cholowky (pronounced “Rock chill-OW-ski”). Considered a solid defensive shortstop, Cholowsky’s twenty-three homers and 1.190 OPS ranked second in the Big Ten, and he has been compared to 2023 AL Rookie of the Year winner Gunnar Henderson, as well as former All-Star Troy Tulowitzki.

Ohio State wide receiver Carnell Tate declared for the NFL draft earlier this month, where he’s expected to be the first pass-catcher off the board. Tate is a native of the West Side, but South Siders might be familiar with his game from his days at Marist High School, where Tate became one of the state’s top recruits before spending his junior and senior years at IMG Academy in Bradenton, Florida. Considered an elite prospect due to a combination of excellent hands and route running ability, analysts project Tate to be among the first ten players selected this spring.