Sunday night’s Buccaneers-Bears game did not end with everyone agreeing on what they had just seen. Instead, it turned into one of those postgame disputes that says as much about football culture as it does about the box score: who thought the line play crossed a line, who thought it was just hard football, and who was willing to say so out loud.
Jonah Jackson made his view clear after the game, responding on 104.3 The Score to the complaints that followed. His point was simple enough. The Buccaneers, he said, were launching themselves at Chicago on every play, and if that sounded like a grievance, he was not interested in treating it as something unusual.
“That’s on him how he feels. It is what it is. This is football, man,” Jackson said, framing the entire exchange as part of the normal give-and-take that comes with a game played in the trenches.
That is really the center of this story. Jackson was not denying the physicality. He was leaning into it. He described the battle up front as rough and rowdy, then pointed to number 50, Vita Vea, as an example of the kind of force both teams were dealing with. His message was that none of this should have come as a surprise to anyone who signed up for the sport.
What Jackson was really saying
Jackson’s comments also touched on the part of football that rarely gets clean answers: holding. He said those calls often go uncalled, and that officials decide which infractions get flagged and which ones stay in the shadows. That is not exactly a revolutionary point, but it is a realistic one. In high-contact games, players usually believe the opponent is getting away with something, and the officials are left sorting out which version of physical play becomes the standard.
“They all do it. It is what it is. You’ve got find ways to combat it,” Jackson said, which is about as straightforward as these postgame exchanges get. In his telling, the issue was not that the Buccaneers played too hard. It was that hard play is part of the job, and the best response is to handle it better rather than complain about it afterward.
The timing matters too. After Sunday night’s game, Luke Goedeke aired grievances about Jeffery Simmons, and Jackson’s comments fit into the same broader argument: where one side sees abuse or unfairness, the other sees the same trench warfare that has always defined the sport. That is why these conversations linger. They are not just about one matchup. They are about how players want football to be interpreted when the contact gets heavy and the whistles stay quiet.
If there is a bigger takeaway here, it is that the argument itself is part of the game. The physical play did not surprise Jackson, and the complaints did not move him. In his view, this was simply football being football — especially in the trenches, where nobody expects things to stay tidy for long.
