Turf toe does not sound serious until you understand what it actually is. Kyle Monangai has it, he will not play Sunday against Green Bay, and Ben Johnson is calling him week to week.
ESPN’s Jeremy Fowler reported Thursday that the injury puts Monangai’s availability in doubt over the next one to two weeks. For a 3-1 Bears team heading into a division game, that timing could not be worse.
Turf Toe Lingers
This is a sprain of the ligaments at the base of the big toe, and it is miserable for a running back specifically. Cutting, pushing off, planting to change direction: those are the exact movements the injury punishes. Players rarely return at full capacity on the first week back.
So the “one to two weeks” framing is probably optimistic, and the “week to week” framing from Johnson is probably honest. Chicago should plan for Monangai to be compromised longer than the initial report suggests.
Johnson has been careful with injury language all season, which is a reasonable approach for a coach who does not want to box himself in. When he says week to week, take him at his word rather than reading it as a one-game absence.
Green Bay Is the Wrong Week to Be Short
Chicago is 3-1 and has already outperformed what most people expected from this group. The Bears got here partly by controlling games on the ground and keeping their quarterback situation from being the story every week.
Take the run game away and the offense has to ask more of everyone else against a Packers defense that has no reason to respect a backup backfield. Green Bay will load up to stop the run and dare Chicago to throw it.
That is the problem with losing a back in October. The season is long enough that one game is survivable, but a division game at 3-1 is the kind of result that decides tiebreakers in January.
What Chicago Does Now
The Bears have to lean on whoever is next in the room and accept a smaller margin for error. Johnson built this offense to be adaptable, and he will get a chance to prove it on short notice.
The encouraging part is that this is a soft-tissue and joint issue, not a structural one. There is no surgery conversation and no season-ending timeline. Monangai will be back, and Chicago’s job is to still be 4-1 or 3-2 when he is.
Three and one teams do not get many easy weeks. This is the first real test of whether Chicago’s start was about one player or about a system, and the Bears are going to find out in Green Bay.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.