CHICAGO — The NFC North emerged as the strongest division in football last season when the Detroit Lions had to go to a Week 18 meeting with the Minnesota Vikings to emerge as the winner with 15 victories.

The Vikings (14-3) and Green Bay Packers (11-6) followed, and the circuit is arguably more rugged this season with the emergence of the Chicago Bears, who at 5-3 have the same record as the Lions and are just behind the Packers (5-2-1). With the Vikings at 4-4 after an upset win in Detroit last Sunday, it’s a wide-open four-team race with nine weeks remaining.

In the locker room, Bears players are taking the cue of first-year coach Ben Johnson, who declared Monday after escaping Cincinnati with a 47-42 win: “We’re right in the mix of it.”

“The parity of the NFL each and every year, it goes down to the wire,” Johnson said. “There’s a lot (at) stake. We can go any number of which ways here in the second half of the season, and I think it’s something our guys are going to get pretty excited about. I’m pleased with where the team is from a mindset perspective.”

The Bears are indeed a legitimate contender at this early juncture, and it’s something Johnson and his staff are delivering meaningful football in November at Soldier Field at a time of year when, the last couple of seasons, it wasn’t premature to start wondering about coaching security, draft order and free agency.

Sunday’s meeting with the 2-7 New York Giants is not insignificant. Since the NFL expanded to a 17-game schedule in 2021, teams that began a season 6-3 qualified for the postseason 73% of the time. Teams with a 5-4 record made the playoffs 52% of the time.

The target, of course, is to win the division. After that, the Bears have to hope they reach 10 wins or more. It’s early but the Bears can talk about controlling their destiny. It’s often a misused phrase, but the point is their future depends on their performance — and not what happens to other teams. Stumble a little and that can change quickly.

“It’s a good situation to be in,” free safety Kevin Byard III said. “If we go out and handle our business, that’s the one thing you can hope for in this league. You do that by just focusing on what is right in front of you. We’ve got the Giants right in front of us.”

Fortuitous starts haven’t always led to promise for the Bears. Their 6-3 start in 2018 turned into a 12-4 finish and an NFC North crown. But they were 7-2 through nine games in 2012 and won only three of their final seven games to miss the playoffs. In 2011, a 7-3 start unraveled after quarterback Jay Cutler suffered a broken thumb and ended in an 8-8 disappointment, again out of the playoffs.

Here are five reasons to have hope for the team’s first playoff appearance since the 2020 season.

1. Belief.

Scoff if you will, but momentum is a real thing, and the Bears built plenty of that during a four-game winning streak. And with three victories in the final minute, they’ve proved adept at navigating critical moments even if they’ve come against suspect opponents.

“Confidence comes from demonstrated performance,” passing game coordinator Press Taylor said. “We’ve done it enough times now so guys believe. Now we get in that scenario and nobody bats an eye. Everybody knows we’re built for this moment because we can handle this moment and we’ve done it before. I think everybody is still searching for that consistency of what can we be if we put it together for four quarters? Because we don’t feel like we’ve done that yet. We’ve done it when we’ve needed to.”

2. Scoring.

Johnson’s offense ranks sixth in the NFL at 26.9 points per game, and it has provided the necessary firepower to win the kind of high-scoring affairs that almost always went against the Bears in the past. They are 3-3 this season when allowing 24 points or more. In the 100 games before Johnson’s arrival in which the opponent scored 24 or more, the Bears were 12-88.

Points are up because the offense and quarterback Caleb Williams are hitting far more big plays than in the past. Entering Week 10, the Bears were tied for third in explosive-play rate at 7% with the Baltimore Ravens and Buffalo Bills, behind only the Seattle Seahawks (8.8%) and Los Angeles Rams (7.3%).

3. Takeaways.

Coaches preach that there’s no greater indicator of success in any given game than the turnover margin. At plus-13, the Bears lead the NFL, a good distance ahead of the second-place Pittsburgh Steelers (plus-9).

Turnover margin is a decent indicator for playoff teams too. Sixteen of the 23 teams (70%) to finish in the top five (or tied for fifth) over the last four years have qualified for the postseason.

4. Stars are stepping up.

Defensive end Montez Sweat has reversed a slow start to the season by picking up his level of play. He has a sack in three consecutive games and has breathed a little life into what was a lackluster pass rush that rarely had success if coordinator Dennis Allen wasn’t dialing up blitzes.

It’s difficult to imagine this team making noise in the second half of the season if its highest-paid players are not being difference-makers. Sweat is flashing again, a positive development along with the return of Austin Booker and potential help the team can get from newly acquired defensive end Joe Tryon-Shoyinka.

“I think we are going to be in a pretty good spot up front,” Johnson said.

5. Reinforcements eventually could arrive.

Nickel cornerback Kyler Gordon, who has had a trio of soft-tissue injuries since August, and cornerback Jaylon Johnson, who had surgery to repair a groin injury, can provide a boost to a pieced-together secondary if they can get back on the field for meaningful games in December. It’s difficult for Allen with the team down its top two cornerbacks but it’s the reality he has been navigating.

There’s also hope that young players continue to ascend, something general manager Ryan Poles noted during the week when he discussed the addition of Tryon-Shoyinka.

“I think they’ve closed a pretty big gap with this new staff,” Poles said. “That gets me even more excited and gets Ben excited to watch our coaches work with these young players.”

Here are three reasons for skepticism that the Bears’ solid start will lead to a postseason berth.

1. The schedule has been packed with the kind of opponents you’d schedule for a Homecoming game.

The five teams the Bears have defeated are a combined 12-32-1 after the Las Vegas Raiders lost a snoozefest Thursday night in Denver. The Dallas Cowboys (3-5-1) have the best record of any team they’ve defeated.

Six of the Bears’ nine remaining games are against teams with five victories or more, and while three of the four final games are at Soldier Field, the schedule is packed with elite head coaches, quarterbacks and edge rushers the rest of the way. Opportunity exists with four division games remaining, but the Bears dropped the first two games of the season against the Minnesota Vikings and Lions and are 3-18 in their last 21 games against NFC North foes. They’re going to have to reverse that trend to achieve any goals.

This is the 23rd time in franchise history the Bears have started 0-2. Never before have they turned an 0-2 start into a playoff season, and being 0-2 in the division makes matters worse.

2. Bad opposing defenses have helped.

You don’t get to pick your opponents and you play them as they come, but the schedule, to this point, has been littered with bad defenses. Fortunately, the Giants are another stumbling defense. Of the eight opponents the Bears have faced, seven entered Week 10 ranked in the bottom 13 in points allowed. Only the Lions (tied for 13th) were in the top half of the league.

3. There’s a huge difference in the numbers when you remove the 47-point explosion in Cincinnati and the 31-14 win over the Cowboys in Week 3.

The Bears are 3-3 in the other six games, averaging just 22.8 points and 242.7 yards per game. Williams’ passer rating against the Bengals and Cowboys was 131.0, and in the other six games it was 81.5.

It’s a credit to the Bears that they put up huge numbers against the Bengals and Cowboys, but pretty much everyone has been doing that. Ben Johnson’s offense and Williams will be tested soon.

But there’s no reason for the Bears to apologize at this point. It’s fair to say they are ahead of schedule with Ben Johnson, which puts the focus squarely on the games each week instead of shifting the focus to the offseason.

“The playoffs are always in the back of our heads,” wide receiver Rome Odunze said. “We’ve got to have a good second half of the season to put ourselves in that conversation and get ourselves a ticket. That’s all you need — a ticket. That’s a different type of ball when you get there. It’s what we need.”

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