The Bears have something of an informed perspective on the 2015 playoffs: They played five of the eight wild-card teams this season, plus the Cincinnati Bengals in the third preseason game (“the best roster we’ve seen,” said one Bears coach), and two (Denver Broncos, Arizona Cardinals) of the four top seeds.
Extend it through a portion of last season and the list expands to include the Carolina Panthers and New England Patriots. Not that simply playing teams is necessarily any sort of “tell,” since the Bears were 2-9 in the games played against the current elites.
But several constants run through the playoff teams, slightly different ones from some other postseason collections.