‘Devastating’: The Chicago Bears’ latest loss — with another blown lead in Cleveland — may cut the deepest

Eddie Jackson sat deep inside his locker stall at Cleveland Browns Stadium, slumped in disbelief. Jackson needed a minute to gather himself, to let the emotion settle in, to find the words to explain Sunday’s surreal collapse, a 20-17 Chicago Bears loss that took what was left of the team’s slim playoff hopes and blew them to smithereens.

“Man,” Jackson said with his voice cracking. “I don’t even know what to say. There are obviously some plays we wish we had back. But this just … I don’t know man. This one cuts so deep.”

Across the Bears locker room, defensive tackle Justin Jones was having similar difficulty figuring out what had just happened, how an afternoon full of defensive playmaking had ended with such anguish as the Bears were outscored 13-0 in the fourth quarter.

“This is devastating,” Jones said. “Devastating. They all hurt. But this one hurt.”

Safety Jaquan Brisker just kept shaking his head, struggling to fathom Sunday’s late unraveling, the third game this season in which the Bears lost after leading by double digits heading into the fourth quarter.

“It’s hard to explain,” Brisker said. “Just losing hurts. Period.”

Make no mistake. The sharp pains from this one will take longer to recede. The NFL’s unofficial 24-hour rule isn’t one-size-fits-all. Thus the Bears will have to live through the nightmare of replaying Sunday’s failure in all its gory detail, particularly for a defense that carried the team the entire afternoon but then crashed in the late stages.

That’s why there was so much shock, so much dejection inside that visiting locker room Sunday. All of it only compounded when the Bears’ final play Hail Mary from the Browns 45-yard line ricocheted out of an eight-player crowd in the end zone and toward Darnell Mooney, who had a storybook game-winning catch in his lap. But he bobbled the football and ultimately kicked it to Browns safety D’Anthony Bell.

“I wish I could have had it,” Mooney said.

Yep. Painful.

Suddenly, the defense’s four sacks felt insufficient. Suddenly, the Bears’ three interceptions — including a 45-yard third-quarter pick six by linebacker Tremaine Edmunds — seemed so insignificant.

In particular, the Bears defense will have to live with the 212 passing yards Browns quarterback Joe Flacco put up in the fourth quarter alone, including an improbable 51-yard TD dart to Amari Cooper and a 34-yard third-and-15 magic trick on Cleveland’s game-winning drive.

On the former, Flacco squeezed a fastball into zone coverage between three defenders with Brisker, Edmunds and cornerback Terell Smith converging on the pass.

“I thought it was going to be an interception to be honest,” Brisker said. “There wasn’t much of a window. We had three people right there.”

Added Bears coach Matt Eberflus: “That ball should have been picked. We have to do a good job of breaking on that, envisioning that. That ball was in the air long enough. At least deflect it.”

Instead, Cooper snatched the ball at the Bears 27-yard line, then sprinted up the right sideline for a game-tying score with 3:08 remaining.

Not long after a Bears punt on the ensuing possession, Flacco’s 34-yard connection to tight end David Njoku (10 catches, 104 yards, one TD) left the Bears defense in disbelief again, a completion that pushed the Browns into range for their game-winning field goal just as the Bears seemed ready to apply their own finishing touches to the game.

On that third-and-15 play, Eberflus dialed up a six-man pressure which sent Brisker, Edmunds and cornerback Kyler Gordon at Flacco as blitzers. But that also left Jones, a 6-foot-3, 309-pound defensive tackle, backpedaling into coverage as Njoku slipped free behind the defense.

Flacco drifted backward enough to buy time, then floated his pass into a wide-open window just as he was hit by Brisker.

“I’m in coverage. On third-and-15,” Jones said. “I’m just doing what’s called, man. I don’t think I’m the best fit for coverage on Njoku. You know what I mean? But it is what it is.”

Added Jackson: “That’s one of those pressures, man, where if it doesn’t get home, it’s going to hit big. And that’s what happened.”

Eberflus was left to answer for that call after the game.

“The thought process there on third-and-15 is you’re going to make him throw it and you’re going to go tackle the catch,” he said. “Then they’re going to end up punting it. Maybe they’ll get half of (the needed yardage). But (the pressure) is to get the ball out of his hands fast.”

Eberflus was also asked to explain his team’s trend of squandering big fourth-quarter leads.

“It comes down to the fundamentals,” he said. “When you watch the tape and really look at it, it’ll be that and it’ll be about playmaking. We have to make the plays down the stretch. That’s what it’s always going to be about.”

Maybe this was all just a timely reminder of just how steep the climb toward competitive relevance truly is and how much longer of a journey these Bears really have. The Bears just weren’t sharp enough Sunday or opportunistic enough. And they paid the price.

In a “gotta have it” game in December, Justin Fields and the offense didn’t get much of anything. The Bears’ lone touchdown drive covered 1 yard after a Jackson interception and somehow required six snaps due to a flurry of penalties and mistakes by both teams.

On the Bears’ other 14 possessions, they managed just 12 first downs and one field goal while going three-and-out eight times.

Fields (19-for-40 passing, 166 yards, one TD, two interceptions) never generated significant momentum and couldn’t put together a scoring drive with the game on the line in the final minutes. The running game (27 attempts, 88 yards) was a non-factor. And the Bears were left — against a majorly depleted Browns team — to lean hard on their defense.

That unit truly seemed up to the task, too. Perhaps no play better signified the defense’s “We got this” vibes than Tyrique Stevenson’s interception late in the third quarter, a brilliant takeaway by the rookie cornerback at the goal line one snap after the Bears had given the ball away with a Trent Taylor muffed punt catch.

In zone coverage, Stevenson noticed Njoku bending his route to the inside, guessed on Flacco’s intentions and broke accordingly. “I just trusted myself, trusted my instincts and went,” Stevenson said. “As soon as I broke on it, he literally let the ball go.”

That was the kind of contribution great teams use as fuel in season-changing victories. And for more than two hours Sunday, the Bears felt their unity and resolve pushing them toward something meaningful. They had every intention of generating a late-season tear.

Said Jones: “If you give us a crumb, we’ll come back with a loaf. We wanted to make the playoffs. We wanted to have our chance to make a run for it. And it was right there.”

Alas, in the game’s final 15 minutes, the Bears couldn’t punctuate what was setting up to be a belief-building road upset. Alas, they were gashed by a series of clutch big plays by the Browns and couldn’t muster the proper response. Alas, they tumbled to 5-9, faded out of the NFC playoff hunt and left Cleveland with that sickening feeling.

“We came out fighting,” Jackson said. “We knew what was at stake with this. We keep practicing. We keep preaching, ‘Finish, finish, finish.’ And it’s like, we were so close. We just have to finish. It’s crazy, man. It is.