Coach Lovie Smith discusses Sunday night’s loss to the Green Bay Packers and the Bears’ playoff preparations exclusively on ChicagoBears.com:

There wasn’t only one disappointing thing about Sunday night’s loss to Green Bay, not when you have an effort like that. It’s just how we played as a football team. It wasn’t one phase, it wasn’t one person. We weren’t ready to play. I didn’t get the team ready to play. We just didn’t get the job done.

Lovie Smith led the Bears to a 13-3 record in his third season as coach.

As we move on and begin preparing for the playoffs, you look at the big picture. Going into the season, if someone would have said, “You’ll finish the season 13-3 with home-field advantage throughout the playoffs,” would you take that? Yes, we would definitely take that.

Our practices this week will be like training camp practices. As far as what the coaches are doing, we’ve been game-planning a little bit for the last couple of weeks. As soon as you know that you’re going to be in the playoffs, you start looking at the teams you could possibly play.

We’ve already faced two of the three teams that we could potentially play in the Seahawks and Giants, so we’re familiar with them. But having a first-round bye allows you to do some extra game-planning, which should help us.

The intensity level is quite a bit different in the playoffs, where it’s one loss and you’re out. You say, “Play every down like it’s your last one.” If you don’t play well, it could be your last down, so the intensity changes drastically, more so I think than even from the preseason to the regular season.

The intensity level also will be elevated in practice this week with our starting units facing each other for the first time since our regular-season bye week. Normally we just have our starters go up against a look squad, but that won’t be the case this week as we try to improve some things without a game to prepare for this coming weekend.