CHICAGO – The Bears couldn’t move the ball against New England’s low-tier defense.

They couldn’t run consistently. They couldn’t throw well. They couldn’t protect Caleb Williams at all.

We could take a deep dive into the numbers proving that point, but the 19-3 final score says it all. The Bears failed to score an offensive touchdown in Sunday’s loss to the Patriots at Soldier Field, extending a streak of eight consecutive quarters without crossing the goal line.

That’s with an offense featuring DJ Moore, Keenan Allen, Rome Odunze, Cole Kmet, D’Andre Swift and the No. 1 overall pick at quarterback.

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This run of offensive ineptitude has sent the Bears’ season spiraling out of control, and its primary players weren’t hiding behind silver linings or tired cliches about the process of improvement in the postgame locker room.

“We haven’t done well these past three weeks,” Kmet said. “Today wasn’t good at all. Not a good performance in any regard. We have to course correct this thing very quickly.”

A team with strong veteran leadership, a group that prides itself on resilience, was never able to recover from another characteristically slow start. The Bears seemed to get worse as the game progressed, unable to create positive momentum or even sustain drives.

“When it got going a certain way, it got hard to get out of the funk of it,” Kmet said. “Even when we were moving the ball, it didn’t really get flowing how it really should’ve. We’ve been in a funk the past three weeks. We have to find a way out of it.”

They must quickly find a way out of this funk before the season is lost. The Bears are 4-5 entering the toughest part of the season, with six games against the highly competitive NFC North, plus contests with the 49ers and Seahawks.

While the Bears can’t make injured members of a decimated offensive line heal faster, they’ll pull out every other stop to get things going again. This offense got rolling during a three-game winning streak entering a Week 7 bye, with 95 points scored in that span. They’re scored 27 points since, and that’s against some defenses struggling before they played Chicago.

“You’ve got to go all the way down to it and look at everything,” head coach Matt Eberflus said. “I think that’s an important part of it. We need a spark in there. We need to be able to move the ball in the scoring zone, to be able to score when we get there. That’s just really it.”

There was plenty of talk about sticking together, honing in on the details and grinding their way towards improved play, which we’ve heard before during this midseason slide.

Frustration was palatable in the locker room after this loss, but the Bears didn’t believe they were on the brink of collapse.

“I don’t think we’re at the breaking point,” receiver DJ Moore said. “We just have to stay together.”

Eberflus wouldn’t eliminate the prospect of changing offensive play callers – he didn’t say he was considering it, either – but emphasized the investment and relationships between players and coaches that will help their effort finding improvement after failing to do so recently.

“It has been rough these past three weeks coming out of the bye, and it’s definitely not where we envisioned ourselves at this point in time,” Kmet said. “That’s especially true coming off the bye and how we were feeling at that point.

“Offensively speaking, we’ve taken a pretty big step back. We have to find ways to claw back and get to at least where we were before the bye week.”