Cole Kmet caught three passes for 28 yards Thursday night, and the third one ended his season.
The Chicago Bears still beat the New England Patriots 30-24, pushing Chicago to a winning record for the first time in what feels like a decade of false starts. Kmet went down with what the team is already calling a season-ending knee injury, carted off a stadium that was, for once, actually celebrating something real. The win is the headline. It shouldn’t be.
Kmet is the second tight end in Bears history to clear 3,000 career receiving yards. The only name ahead of him is Mike Ditka.
He got there the hard way. Chicago took him 43rd overall out of Notre Dame in 2020, which means he caught passes from Mitchell Trubisky, then Justin Fields, and finally Caleb Williams, while the sideline turned over from Matt Nagy to Matt Eberflus to Ben Johnson. Three quarterbacks. Two coaching changes. He was the longest-tenured Bear on the roster walking into this season, which says less about his talent than it does about everyone Chicago cycled through around him.
Then, this week, the losing finally stopped, and he’s the one who doesn’t get to watch what happens next.
Ben Johnson got to the podium Friday and skipped the version of this answer coaches usually give. He called Kmet “one of the glue guys” and kept going, further than most coaches let themselves go for a tight end on an injury report: “Really, he’s Chicago. He’s been here his whole life, and he’s a big part of our heartbeat. So, it stinks, it does, I hate it for him, I hate it for his teammates as well.”
Nobody talks that way about a replaceable piece of the depth chart.
This isn’t even the first time this season Johnson has had to answer whether his offense survives losing a piece of it. The last time this offense had to prove it could survive losing a piece, it was Caleb Williams nursing a hamstring injury, not a tight end who’d been on the roster since before Johnson had the job. Johnson says the scheme won’t change — Colston Loveland and rookie Sam Roush are next up — and he’s probably right about the Xs and Os. That was never really the question.
Ian Rapoport had the injury report breaking live before Johnson ever reached the podium:
https://twitter.com/RapSheet/status/2113654001501945938
By Friday afternoon it was official. Chicago placed Kmet on injured reserve, closing the door on any version of this where he’s back for a playoff push he helped build.
https://twitter.com/RapSheet/status/2113694460920082703
My mom doesn’t follow football. She texted asking if “the nice one who’s always been there” was going to be okay, which is the read you get on a guy who outlasted three regimes without the casual fans ever quite clocking they were watching continuity instead of mediocrity.
He’d caught 10 passes for 87 yards and a touchdown in seven games before Thursday — modest numbers for a modest role, and that’s the whole point. Kmet was never anyone’s highlight reel. He was the guy who showed up every year the Bears gave everybody else a reason not to.
Kmet survived every bad year so this team could be good without him.
