As the Bears game against the Cleveland Browns kicked off at noon at Soldier Field, the temperature in Chicago was 5 degrees with a wind chill of minus-7, making it one of the coldest games in the team’s history.
The official game-time temperature at Soldier Field was 8 degrees.
But the temperature did not seem to dampen the Bears’ excitement in what has so far been a surprising winning season, a pattern they upheld Sunday with a 31-3 victory.
“We love this. This is Bear weather,” second-year quarterback Caleb Williams told his teammates before kickoff in a video posted to the team’s account on X, formerly Twitter. “It’s where we’re meant to be, it’s where we’re going to be for the rest of the year.”
The temperature at kickoff was some 25 degrees below the normal average for this time of year in the area, according to National Weather Service data.
Still, Sunday’s game was no Ice Bowl, when the Green Bay Packers played the Dallas Cowboys at 13 degrees below zero on Dec. 31, 1967 — the coldest NFL game ever.
But it was enough to keep many fans at home.
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Last week, the cheapest tickets for the game were around $281, but prices dropped sharply after forecasts of plummeting temperatures began circulating online. Tickets were as low as $86 on Thursday, according to secondary ticket marketplace TickPick.
Gusts of 10-15 miles per hour and dangerous subzero windchills started late Saturday and carried into Sunday. Chills as low as -20 to -28 degrees were recorded in the area overnight, including DeKalb, Waukegan, West Chicago, Wheeling and Valparaiso in Indiana.
According to the weather service, bitter temperatures Sunday morning were the coldest the Chicago area has had this early in the season since the “infamously” cold and snowy winter of 2013-14. A low of -2 degrees was recorded at O’Hare International Airport earlier in the day. The city was similarly cold on Dec. 10, 2013, at -6 degrees.
In addition to early blasts of cold, the Chicago area has also already seen a lot of snow. The weather service has called this the snowiest start to winter in almost 50 years, since the 1978-79 season, which dropped a total of nearly 90 inches on the Chicago area.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/12/14/bears-weather-subzero-cold/
