PTI - Bears Beat the Packers in Overtime!

Episode Date: December 23, 2025

Michael Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser discuss Bears/Packers, Jaguars, Patriots, Steelers, Panthers, CFP First Round, Texans, Chargers, and DK Metcalf. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, sports fans, the ESPN app has all of ESPN all in one place. The ESPN app is your home to thousands of live events, ESPN shows, and originals across every ESPN network and service. And now you can check if you already have ESPN Unlimited as part of your TV package for no additional calls. Visit activate.esPN.com to learn how to access your account or sign up, then start streaming in the ESPN app. It's all of ESPN all in one place. Sign up or activate now. Pardon the interruption, but I'm Mike Will about Tony. We had just two shows this week today on ESPN, tomorrow, on the deuce. And Tony Kornheiser, she's saying this is the last one that counts, right?

Come on, that's not the holiday spirit. That's not the holiday spirit. You got to do better than that. All right, well, I'll tell you what, I'll come back tomorrow and I'll see if I can do better than that. Welcome to PTI, B.T.I. In today's episode, the Bears somehow beat the Packers. The first four college football playoff games were in the books, and D.K. Metcalf takes a swipe at a fan.

But we begin today with yesterday's NFL action. Four games, each with playoff implications, seem to stand out from the crowd. The Jaguars handily beat the Broncos in Denver, 3420. The Steelers beat the Lions in Detroit, receiving the benefit in the final seconds of two offensive pass interference calls. The Patriots beat the Ravens in Baltimore as Drake May threw for 380 yards, and New England scored 15 unanswered points in the fourth quarter. And Carolina at home held off Tampa Bay to take possession of their division lead.

Wilbon, which Sunday win was the most important to you? Tony, asking that question, I'm going to parse words you for a second. If you ask me which was the most impressive win to me, I would tell you Jacksonville at Denver. Denver had won 11 straight games. I think that's the hardest place to win in the league. We can argue Green Bay, Seattle, Denver, but I know you and I are pretty much on the same page on that. That would be the most impressive win.

But Tony, the most important one is probably Pittsburgh over the Lions. Because that affected so many things going on. I mean, we'll get to the Bears, but it pushed the bears into the playoffs when they might have had to win a game that's going to be tough to win with at San Francisco and at home against Detroit. Detroit, it puts them on the verge of extinction.

And Tony, you look at the window for the lions, and I know you have liked them for a couple of years, as have I. But Tony, it looks like with all the injuries and they've got free agents coming up and they're going to be people taking up larger chunks of the salary cap that the window could be closing on Detroit. in Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh captured, not captured, they're in control of their own division situation,

and they backhanded Baltimore, which is in its own trouble. So I think I'm going to say Pittsburgh winning in detois. Okay. I'm going to agree with you right down the line. I'm going to hold up all my notes. If people can see them, they'll see exactly what I've written before I say it. Jacksonville had the most impressive win. They've won, I think, seven in a row now and eight out of nine. And Trevor Lawrence, who you loved coming out of college, and I liked a lot coming out of college, he had been somewhat of an underachiever. He's not an underachiever lately. He's closing like a great horse. In his last four games, he has 14 touchdowns running and passing and no interceptions. So I give you that. Pittsburgh, I agree, is the most

important win because they have turned their season around. They now look like they're going to win that division. This started when people in the stands hollered out fire Tomlin. And the response was they won three games in a row. Aaron Rogers looks like Aaron Rogers at the moment. And please don't tell me that that was not offensive pass interference. It was. He used two hands. He used two hands to push off. That's right. Now the Patriots have a good win on the road in Baltimore. Baltimore is not as good as we thought, but they're now 7 and O on the road, the Patriots. you know, and Carolina did what it had to do. But Carolina does not clinch a division, Mike.

Two weeks down the road, they got to do it again in Tampa Bay. So they just kicked the can down the road. So I agree with you. Well, stay with me talking to you. All right, Wilbon, let's not keep you waiting any longer. Let's get to the Chicago Bears' huge win at home on Saturday night in overtime. Over the hated Green Bay Packers. You were there.

You haven't slept since then. You're so happy. Take us through. How did it feel? And what does it mean? Tony, you know, I've been going to sporting events in Chicago, including playoff events and championships and ones where they skate the Stanley Cup out.

I've seen all of that with my teams all my life, luckily, 60-plus years. This was as joyous as anything I have ever attended in Chicago that didn't include a guy wearing 23 and white. It was that joyous because it was beating the Packers. and the Packers, as Aaron Rogers reminded us a couple of times in his late years there, he and they owned us. And you get tired of it. You get tired of the people up north coming down and just beating the Bears.

And the Bears owned the rivalry at one point, but that was the 80s and the 90s. The Packers have owned it. And to win the game that way, Tony, it wasn't possible to win the game. The game was over to even recover an on-size kick, what they say is the 8% chance. At one point, the Bears had a five- one-hundredths percent of a chance to win the game according to whatever stupid metrics are out there. But I just sat there thinking, this is done. I'm angry. The loser of this game could really miss the playoffs. But to win the game with Caleb Williams throwing those two passes, one to get us in the overtime, one to win the game to

DJ Moore, it's stunning. It's one of the stunning games in a city that is just, you know, you know, used to to big sporting events, it still ranks way up there. I'm going to give a couple of numbers here because I think they're important for context. This is the first time since 2018 that the Bears beat the Packers in Chicago. It's a long time. And that's why Aaron Rogers said, I own you. Over the last 17 seasons, okay, the Bears have only won six of these games wherever they've been played.

You know, 29 and 6, 35 games. So it's a huge win. I know you sat with your boy Richard Dent and you sat with the mayor of Chicago and you hug the owner of the Bears. And it just seems to me, who did you hug? You hug the president of the Bears, right? Yeah, the soon-to-be Indiana Bears, as we like to call them in my house. So here's what I need, because I'm happy for you. I'm happy for you.

The Bears this year have won six games now when they've trailed in the last two minutes. That's the most. any team has won under those conditions since the merger. That's over 50 years. So I think you should do a Super Bowl video. You and Dent and Otis Wilson and Tommy Waddle. You should do a Super Bowl because this is the dream of your life. This is the dream of your life.

It is a joyous fall stressful because every game comes down to something crazy like Saturday night. But how can you complain? It's also magical. It is. You don't use that term in a big city. You know, but we're acting like little kids in Chicago right now. No, I mean, you know, I'm happy for you. Can I just remind, I want to remind you of one thing.

What's that? Beginning of the year, you were afraid they'd go 0 in 5. Yes. You're 11 and 4. They didn't go 0 and 5, did they? At 0.2 with a 52 to 17 loss? Is that what the Detroit loss? At 0 and 2, having lost 52 to 17, I was terrified.

Yes. Yes, I admit it. Now I'm overjoyed. Let's move to the opening round of the results from the college football playoff. Alabama trailed 17 nothing on Friday night before bouncing back to beat Oklahoma by 10. In Saturday's games, Miami snuck past Texas A&M,

Ole Miss Crush Tulane, and Oregon beat James Madison, though not as soundly as Ducks coach Dan Lannning apparently would have liked. To know which playoff opener stood out to you. If I'm going to be honest, because I watched them all, if I'm going to be honest, the one that stood out the most to me was Miami and Texas A&M because it was so terrible for so long, for 57 minutes. It was torture. It was brutal.

There was no offense. It was three nothing with eight minutes to go. It was three, three after 57 minutes. Now, the last two and a half to three minutes were spectacular. unbelievably exciting. You're at the edge of your seat unless you had fallen asleep because the game was so terrible before that. These are good teams. Miami and A&M are good teams. I'm not going to knock it. And yes, I know they beat Notre Dame in August by three points in one point. But if I played for Notre Dame or I rooted for Notre Dame and I had to watch this thing, I would say, come on, we'll play them both tonight. We'll play them both tonight. We'll beat them both. And I want to say this overall thing. And you can explain why you and I have a disagreement over this.

about the college football playoff at the moment. God bless Tulane and God bless James Madison, but I don't think they belong in this tournament. I don't think it's a charity tournament for the gang of five teams. I think it's only 12 teams, and I think you get the best 12 in the country, and I think Texas and Notre Dame should have been in there and not these other schools.

I think I'm in the minority in this. I know you disagree with that, but that's how I feel. Yeah, you don't call the NCAA men's basketball tournament charity when one of your favorite schools beats up on some little school by 64 teams. You don't call that charity. How many teams is it's the attempt to be national. March Madness is huge. What college football has attempted to do after years of being stupid and obstinate

was to essentially copy the NCAA men's basketball tournament even though football is going to get greater viewership. So that's what they're doing. in Congress, God, help me for even resorting to Congress, there are going to be forces in this country that don't just say, give us the biggest schools, and we'll just take a pile on the small schools, a group of five that don't have the same resources, and the big schools refuse to play.

So that's that for me, and that's the way it's going to stay. Luckily, more people feel like me. The game that mattered was Alabama being down by 17, because you could already hear in the airport the announcement. Will Coach DeBoer please report to the airline, the flight headed for Detroit is leaving in about an hour? Because if they continue to lose that game like that, it would have been a mess.

Congratulations to Alabama and Miami for winning on the road. Last year, the home teams went down, won 4-0 in this particular round. And I should also say, I don't know how you feel about this. Maybe you consider Oregon a Big 10 team. I look at A&M and I look at Oklahoma. I don't really think of them as SEC teams. I think of the most Southwest Conference teams or Big A teams.

I just don't. Let's take a break. Same here. Coming up, the Chargers and the Texans both win again. Which team should feel better heading into Saturday's matchup? And what should happen to D.K. Metcalf after he took what looks like a slight, but a fan, whatever that was. By the way, the three leading candidates for Coach of the Year, Jacksonville, New

England, and the Bears, they all won. They all won this weekend. Trying to find out what's nagging the naughty and nice in mail time. Let's see what's first. I'll put on my glasses. Should the Chargers or Texans feel better about themselves heading into Saturday's matchup? Well, Tony, you know, this is interesting because neither one of them beat a war.

world beater. They remained hot by doing what good teams really do most of the year. If you're going to be good, beat the bad teams, beat the teams you're supposed to. I was less impressed with Houston narrowly eking out victory over Pete Carroll and his Raiders, a little bit more impressed with the charges, scoring a bunch of points against the Cowboys, although everybody scores bunches of points against the Cowboys. So I think they did what they're supposed to do. I don't want to see these two as feisty as they've been. Chargers have won four straight, seven out of eight. Houston's won eight out of nine and seven straight.

I don't want to see them face each other in like some first round game. I'd like to see them maybe, you know, go against the heavyweight each one of them. And if they advance, meet and play each other in that next round. But they give the AFC a little more depth right now than it appears to have had. So who are you picking? Who are you picking? And the Chargers? I'll take the Chargers,

you should feel better. I'm going to go the other way. Yeah, I'm going to say that Houston should feel better precisely because of what you said, because they almost gave one away yesterday. They were at home, and they won a two-point game against the Raiders who have the worst record in the league.

I think they'll probably spend this entire week atoning for that bad performance and be totally jacked up when they go to play the Chargers. The game is in L.A. I think that also benefits Houston, the cliche is that defense travels. Yusin has the best defense in the league in terms of points allowed, 16.6 a game.

The tail of the tape for boxing fans is very similar. The charges are 11 and 3 or 11 and 4, 11 and 4, and the Texans are 10 and 5. As you said before, the charges have won 7 out of 8, the Texans have won 7 in a row, and 8 out of 9. This is the AFC right now. It's up in the air. It's a jumble of teams. and these two teams in particular, unlike New England and unlike Buffalo, these two teams have been under the radar the entire season.

Mail! Look as good as Buffalo right now, though. How should the NFL punish D.K. Metcalfe for taking a swipe at a fan? Well, we know now that the NFL has suspended Metcalf two games and he says he's going to appeal. I don't know. I mean, there wasn't a punch that was landed. This doesn't look good. A swipe?

I don't know. I mean, sometimes it's okay to say, I don't know. I guess the NFL, I don't know how much they could have investigated between that point and this morning or this afternoon when they announced his penalty. It just, it's irritating, Tony, I'm sure, to a league to have as many spectacular things as went on this weekend, to have to even deal with this. And Metcalf seems like he's been in the middle of stuff before. I just don't know.

I'm not rubber stamping this. I need to know what was said. I don't know what was said. And if there's more video, let me see that too. Yeah. So I thought that a one-game suspension would be adequate. Metcalfe will appeal this suspension of two games and may very well get it knocked down to one game.

I don't think he's going to get it knocked out, just maybe knocked down to one. You say you need more evidence. The evidence, you know, it's not like Dusty Baker, looking at the cork bat and saying we have to wait until we gather all the evidence. All the evidence has gathered. CBS deliberately showed this.

He took a swipe at a fan. They showed it. Everybody has seen this. I don't know what the relationship of these two men are. Some people say that this has been going on in other games. I don't know if that's true. I don't know what was said. I'm pretty sure of this, Mike.

I'm confident of this. A player can't do this. Can't take a swipe like that. You've got to walk away. You just can't do it. If it goes down to one game, that's Cleveland game. and he goes back into the lineup against Baltimore, which is probably more important.

Enough email, let's take one last break. Still to come, Philip Rivers takes the field again tonight, this time facing the 49ers. And the socks and the socks both made acquisitions, which one, red or white, is more impressive. You just can't swing at somebody or do that. You're a player. Don't do it.

Walk away. You got to walk up. on that. You got to walk. Happy time, people. Happy 81st birthday, Steve Carlton. The Hall of Fame Lefty won the Cy Young Award four different times for the Philadelphia Phillies, and five times led the National League in strikeouts around the time Tom Seaver and Ferguson Jenkins were pitching. Carlton was on two World Series winners in 1967 with the Cardinals, 1980 in Philadelphia, where he pitched for 15 of his 24 big league seasons.

In 1972, Carlton had what might be the greatest season. ever for a pitcher. He went 27 and 10 with a 197 ERA, 30 complete games, and eight shutouts. Carlton led the National League and wins ERA innings pitched 346 and strikeouts 310. All this pitching for a Phillies team that went 59 and 97 and finished in last place, 37 and a half games out of first. Tony, there's got to be more than Theo Epstein at the top of Major League Baseball's brain trust pyramid that understands what great starting pitching can mean to the sport, the product, attracting people.

It really is the thing. Theo's the only one he's out there by himself singing solo. You don't have like everybody doesn't realize stuff like this. Steve Carl, my God. Happy anniversary, Philip Rivers. On this day, 22 years ago, Rivers threw for 475 yards and five touchdowns in his last game as quarterback for NC State in a 56-26-26 win over Kansas in the Tangerine Ball. Tonight, Rivers will be back at quarterback for the second time in five years as the Colts

host of 49ers on Monday night football. Now 44 years old, Rivers and his wife welcomed their first grandchild last year. The immediate Rivers clan consists of seven daughters and three sons, the oldest of whom Gunner at 17, is a star high school quarterback in Alabama where Rivers coaches. Gunner is a 2007 recruit. and has numerous offers already, including one from NC State. I know the 49ers are missing Bosa and Warner, but the 49ers major in taking quarterbacks out of what it is they feel comfortable doing. And now with the week to adjust and maybe do what wasn't done last week,

worried about Phillip Rivers tonight. Happy trails to Missouri for the Kansas City Chiefs. The team announced today that it intends to leave our own. head stadium and move across the state line from Missouri to Kansas after 2013. Kansas has been courting the team for some time, proposing to pay up to 70% of the cost of a new dome stadium. The Chiefs would be the third NFL team to leave Missouri in recent decades. The Cardinals left St. Louis for Arizona after the 1987 season, and the Rams came for 21 years before returning to L.A. Well, but I know you said the Bears won't leave for Indiana,

but Fort Wayne is shooting its shot, posting a mock-up of a new stadium with the California. option, don't mind us, just seeing how this looks, and see seeing your team. I overwhelmingly pay no attention to these announcements, just like you paid no attention when the Washington Capitals and Wizards announced they were entering an agreement with the governor of the state of Virginia. How'd that turn out? Yeah, well, I did pay attention. I called it villainy, you know, and they didn't move because the governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia is a one-term guy and he doesn't have that kind of power. Let's go to the big finish. The Red Sox traded for Cardinals' first baseman Wilson Contreras, White Sox signed

Japanese slugger Munitaka Murakami. Bigger deal. Murakami, he's 25 years old. He had 56 home runs three years ago. Man, I can't believe he didn't go to the north side. Bill Belichick is reportedly finalizing a deal with Bobby Petrino to be his offensive coordinator. Is that a good move? Petrino was once a good coach like Belichick. Anthony Joshua knocked out Jake. on the sixth. Your thoughts? There's broken stuff. Broken stuff from that fight. Enough with Jake Paul.

George South suspended head coach, A Cooley, one game for throwing a water bottle that hit a child. Your thoughts? He has apologized profusely. It was very bad. He threw it really hard into the stands. That was just not good. Last one.

Sidney Crosby passed Mario Lemieux as the Penguins' all-time points to you're impressed, aren't you? Yeah, LeMew's the most important player, the greatest player in franchise history. Absolutely. Alex and Leonard Copeland, Coulin. Shout out. I'm Mike Wilbon. Deuce tomorrow, knuckleheads.