Bears tight end Cole Kmet doesn’t talk to his sister Frankie much during rivalry week.
After all, she’s dating a Packer: defensive end Lukas Van Ness.
“She did ask for tickets, and I just sent her the tickets,” Kmet said this week. “But I didn’t really respond to anything else besides that.”
Why not let her ask Van Ness for the lesser tickets given visiting players?
“They wanted the better seats,” Kmet said with a smile.
Kmet went to St. Viator High School in Arlington Heights and Van Ness grew up not far away, attending Barrington High School. Kmet joked that he usually doesn’t know what side of the NFL’s greatest rivalry his sister is rooting for until after the game ends.
“Usually she’s just happy to see both of us healthy… ” he said. “But I hope deep down she’s rooting for us.”
Saturday night’s playoff game at Soldier Field is the 213th matchup between the rivals, the most games ever played between two NFL teams, and one of the most consequential: it’s just the third time they’ve met in the playoffs. The last time they played in the postseason, the Packers beat the Bears in the NFC championship game 15 years ago on their way to their most recent Super Bowl win.
Familiarity has bred discontent since 1921, when the Packers joined the American Pro Football Association one year after the Bears, who were first called the Decatur Staleys, helped found it. It’s festered the last six weeks, too. The Bears will be facing the Packers for the third time since Dec. 7, with the teams splitting the first two games on last-second heroic plays.
“Just to be part of a historical rivalry within itself, that’s something special,” said Bears defensive tackle Grady Jarrett, who signed as a free agent in March. “If you want to talk about this season in particular, you have two games that went all the way down to the last play.
“Two fan bases, two locker rooms that don’t care too much for each other. That’s what makes it so great.”
Most players didn’t grow up with the rivalry. In the 106 years since the Bears were founded, only 107 players who played high school football in Illinois have played a snap for the team.
Outsiders learn fast, though. Bears chairman George McCaskey — and, before him, his late mother Virginia — have made sure of that, teaching rookies about the history of the rivalry.
“Coming in as a Bear, you feel it,” safety Jaquan Brisker said. “It feels like you’re born to dislike the Packers.”
Jayden Reed actually was. The Packers receiver was born in Chicago and grew up in Aurora before transferring to play his senior season at Naperville Central. He had a picture of Walter Payton hanging on the wall in his childhood bedroom. His favorite player was another Pro Football Hall of Famer, return wiz Devin Hester.
When the Packers took Reed in Round 2 of the 2023 draft, though, all that went out the window.
“I don’t think it’s weird,” he said, “because this is the organization that believed in me.”
Not everyone in his life agrees. On his family’s text thread, a cousin talks smack about the Packers and sends Reed updates about how well the Bears are doing.
“He just won’t flip,” Reed said. “We said we were going to kick him out of the group chat, but we let him stay. That’s what makes it fun.”
Bears receiver DJ Moore poked fun at the Packers after his game-winning 46-yard touchdown catch in overtime last month. Running back Roschon Johnson was handed a foam cheese grater hat — the Bears’ answer to “cheeseheads” — and put it on Moore’s head for a locker room celebration.
The receiver was happy to needle the Packers, whose players yap more often — “During the game, before the game, always,” he said — than any team the Bears play.
Brisker expects even more of it Saturday.
“Now that we’re in the tournament,” he said, “they’re a little more sensitive.”
Cornerback Jaylon Johnson was so annoyed by the trash talk from Packers fans in last year’s finale that he flipped off the Lambeau Field faithful as he limped to the locker room.
Such smack goes both ways, even inside state lines. Weeks before his first-ever training camp as Packers head coach in 2019, Matt LaFleur took his family to Lake Geneva — and was greeted by taunts from Bears fans.
“I was like, ‘We’re in Wisconsin,” he said. “And I saw these Bears fans giving me a hard time.”
Jonathan Ford has seen both sides of the rivalry in the past month alone. The Bears cut the defensive tackle Dec. 27. He stayed home all weekend, presuming the Bears would sign him to their practice squad two days later, until the Packers claimed him. Two hours later, he was driving toward the Packers facility. He knew the way — Green Bay drafted him in 2022.
Witnessing the rivalry from both sidelines led him to one conclusion — both fan bases hate each other equally.
“It’s the same,” he said. “It’s very intense. Everybody cares.”
Kmet has cared his whole life.
“It means a lot,” he said. “To be able to be at home, against Green Bay, it’s going to be a special atmosphere. It almost feels like we’ve played these guys five or six times here in the past month. But I think that will just make the atmosphere and the battle that much more epic.”
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