CHICAGO (670 The Score) -- Charlie Brown was at the Bears’ game Saturday. Call it the Christmas spirit or the gift of extremely cheap tickets, but he was there. Tucked away in section 348 at Soldier Field (you know, the weird sliver of seats just above the north end zone that only stretch four-wide) with his buddy, Charlie Brown – whose real name was pretty obviously not that – had enough layers on to fully clothe the entire section. The idea was, he said, that the concrete wall at the end of the truncated row would shield him from 35-mph gusts that were responsible for some of the coldest wind chills in decades. It didn’t really work. Unphased, they quickly moved to Plan B.
“I’ve got something,” he said with a grin, reaching into his jacket pocket. In his outstretched hand, an unopened airplane bottle of Fireball Whisky gleamed in the bright December sun. “Shit, I’ve got about 25.”
Given that the Bears just lost their eight straight game, it’d be easy to empathize with Charlie – regardless of the conditions. But with temperatures struggling to touch double digits at any point during the Bears' 35-13 clunker of a loss to the Bills, keeping a few pulls of cheap whiskey on hand felt less like a party trick and more like a practical one. The 9-degree temperature at kickoff was tied for the seventh-coldest for a game at Soldier Field since 1963, the team said.
If you’re going to use your fingers to count the number of times that Bears receivers dropped a well-placed Justin Fields pass or point to Stefon Diggs in envy, it always helps when you can feel the hand they’re attached to.
“I feel like in the first quarter, you almost become numb to it,” said Bears tight end Cole Kmet, who probably felt that way on account of not wearing any sleeves. “Like, literally. It is what it is. I think it’s fun.”
Not everyone in the Bears’ locker room shared Kmet’s (on-brand) enthusiasm for arctic bomb cyclones. Fields lamented that the wind wreaked havoc on every aspect of the game, all the way down to the tosses he was throwing to running back David Montgomery. Cornerback Kyler Gordon mentioned that running through the gusts felt like his face was being cut. Kicker Cairo Santos, who spent 98% of his day standing still, struggled with consistently regulating his body temperature.
“When you’re sitting down, you know your muscles are getting tight,” he said. “So you’ve got to get up, walk around, and stuff. Then you get cold, so you really don’t feel warm at all. You just kind of learn how to kick feeling cold.”
Fortunately, the players on the sidelines weren’t totally left out in the … you know. Everyone kept their standard issue puffy jackets/gigantic sleeping bags tightly wrapped around them when they weren’t on the field – and sometimes even when they were – and there were more than a few industrial heaters waiting for players when the whistle blew. Even the benches were heated. The measures didn’t seem to help much (except for punter Trenton Gill, who half-joked that he “felt like he was warmer than the guys playing”), but it’s difficult to think of anything that would. Maybe a roof? That's attached to a brand new stadium? In Arlington Heights?
“With the wind, I’ve never felt anything like that,” receiver Velus Jones Jr. said. “Especially when the ball was in the air – it was sometimes difficult to judge the ball because it was always moving around. Definitely extra focus. Yeah, that was one to remember.”
Cam Ellis is a writer for 670 The Score and Audacy Sports. Follow him on Twitter @KingsleyEllis.
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