Chicago Bears at Dallas Cowboys: Everything you need to know about the Week 8 game

Coming off an upset of the New England Patriots on “Monday Night Football,” the 3-4 Chicago Bears have another road test on a short week, facing the 5-2 Dallas Cowboys on Sunday at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas. Here’s what you need to know before kickoff (noon, Fox-32).

When Tom Brady said at the beginning of the month that there’s a lot of “bad football from what I watch,” he probably wasn’t envisioning his Tampa Bay Buccaneers being square in the middle of that discussion near the midpoint of the season.

The Buccaneers, who lost to the Baltimore Ravens 27-22 at home Thursday night, were one of 15 teams entering Week 8 at or within one game of .500, a large grouping of mediocrity that includes the Chicago Bears (3-4), Green Bay Packers (3-4) and both participants in Super Bowl LVI — the Los Angeles Rams (3-3) and Cincinnati Bengals (4-3).

It’s not an unusually high number of teams huddled around .500 after seven weeks. The average at this juncture over the last decade is 13.2 teams with a high of 18 in 2017 and low of five in 2020.

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General manager Ryan Poles made another major move in the Chicago Bears rebuild Wednesday, trading defensive end Robert Quinn to the Philadelphia Eagles.

The Bears will receive a fourth-round draft pick in return, while the 6-0 Eagles acquire a veteran pass rusher with 102 sacks during a 12-year NFL career. That includes a Bears-record 18½ sacks last season.

From a business standpoint the deal, in Poles’ words, “made too much sense.”

“This is going to allow us to continue to build a highly competitive roster,” he said.

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At least one school district that serves the area where the Arlington International Racecourse is located in Arlington Heights has warned village leadership that creating a tax-incentive district to facilitate the redevelopment plans the Chicago Bears team is proposing for the site — including building a new NFL stadium — “would be a real concern,” public records show.

The football team inked a $197 million purchase agreement for the former Arlington Park International Racecourse site last year. In September, the Bears unveiled plans for a mixed-use commercial and residential development alongside the new, domed stadium it plans to build on the former racecourse, though leadership emphasized the still-tentative nature of the plans.

Given the $5 billion estimated cost of the Bears’ project, Palatine School District 15 Superintendent Laurie Heinz said the team or the village should chip in to help the school district respond to the increased student population and its needs anticipated as a result of the redevelopment.

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