For Fuck’s Sake, Get It Right This Time!
For Fuck’s Sake, Get It Right This Time!
Old Guys Out, New Guys In
The New Crew
Now, where were we?
The last time we talked the Chicago Bears were headed to Minnesota for their season-ending tangle with the Vikings. The Bears got their asses kicked in that game, 31-17, the details of which we don’t even recall too well at this point. The Bears had the lead, they give it away, they lost, they stink, they ended the season 6-11 and they probably weren’t even that good.
Then the Bears did what they had to do but many of us feared they wouldn’t: they fired everyone. Not everyone, but they canned the guys most responsible on a day-to-day basis for yet another crappy season; general manager Ryan Pace and head coach Matt Nagy.
They were not good at their jobs. They might have been if they had a bit more luck or help but they work for an organization that has none and provides little so, boppo! Out the door you go.
Ryan Pace was about as bad a GM as you can imagine. In a half-dozen years running the Bears he put one good team on the field. One. Now if that team had won the Super Bowl, that would be a different story, now wouldn’t it? Heck, yes. But that one good team Pace assembled got double-doinked in the first round of the playoffs following the 2018 season. The Bears did make the postseason one more time under Pace and Nagy, but that also ended in a first round exit after the 2020 season and was not a good team at all.
In honesty, fairness, and charity, the Bears did play better in that wildcard loss to the Saints a year ago than many give them credit for. But although a loss may lead to lots of interpretation it still doesn’t feed the bulldog.
So Pace had to go. His great error was never getting it right at quarterback, hiring a bad coach, overpaying under-talented guys, all that kind of stuff.
Pace will be remembered in infamy in Chicago mostly for drafting quarterback Mitch Trubisky, actually trading up with the San Francisco 49ers to get him in 2017 instead of taking Patrick Mahomes who went to the Kansas City Chiefs.
It was a mistake of enormous consequences. Mahomes has played in four straight AFC Championship games, won a Super Bowl, has been a league MVP, and already has a gold jacket waiting for him in Canton, Ohio. Trubisky is now a backup with the Buffalo Bills.
(And the 49ers since 2017 have made the playoffs twice, reached two NFC title games and played in one Super Bowl)
But the view here is that while Pace’s failure to draft Mahomes instead of Trubisky was his biggest blunder it’s not the one he should be most faulted for, even while strictly talking quarterbacks. Consider this, please. Ryan Pace took over the Bears in time for the 2015 NFL draft. By that point everyone in the Milky Way knew that Jay Cutler, who had been in Chicago since 2009, was not working out as the Bears quarterback and he certainly wasn’t the long-term solution. Yet, Pace chose not to draft a quarterback, not even a flyer in the late rounds, in 2015.
Then, in 2016, Pace again took a knee on the most important position in American pro sports. The Bears sucked at quarterback but the Bears GM said, no, we are not going to try and get better at quarterback by drafting one.
The next year, Pace put all his chips in on Trubisky and whiffed badly. A mistake, yes. But isn’t the bigger mistake not even trying? Again, how do you get better by not trying to get better? Pace could have hung on to his draft picks, taken Mahomes, paired him with a decent Bears defense and oh, dolly, we’d be drinking wine and singing ‘til the morning in Chicago, wouldn’t we?
Patrick Mahomes is far more talented than Mitch Trubisky. So is the other top-tier quarterback Pace passed on in 2017, Clemson’s Deshaun Watson, who went to the Houston Texans. Again, Pace blew it. But again, let’s be fair and understanding. As extra-terrestrial as Mahomes has been in his five NFL seasons, especially compared to Trubisky, Mahomes also plays for a better coach (also Pace’s fault) and has better receivers around him (Pace!) but, what we’re scratching at also is that Mahomes, be honest now, was not that great this past season. He often looked quite ordinary. And in the Super Bowl defeat to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers a year ago, Mahomes was running for his life when his offensive line suffered injuries.
Yes, Mahomes still looked spectacular while running for his life but we can quickly see how even the greatest can look ordinary when the pieces around them start to crumble. And then let’s zip back to this season. Mahomes was terrific in the first half of the AFC title game against the Bengals and then was terrible in the second half, and the Chiefs coughed up a 21-3 lead and lost in overtime.
Is Mahomes really that much better than Trubisky? Well, yes, but our point is that even though quarterback is the most important position, you still have to build the rest of the team. But let’s keep having fun.
The Bears, Pace, should have taken Mahomes but let’s acknowledge that no one can predict the future. Pace wasn’t the only one who thought Trubisky was better than Mahomes. And can we agree that, not having been able to predict the future, drafting Trubisky probably at least turned out to be a better move than taking Watson, who is facing dozens of accusations of sexual assault or harassment and because of this did not play a single snap for the Texans in the 2021 season?
Pace failed miserably in the QB derby in the 2017 draft but every GM in every sport, including some who have crowded trophy cases, have made terrible draft picks and other ignominious moves. Pace’s 2017 Trubisky error cannot be fully and fairly assessed without acknowledging the phantom Chicago quarterbacks of the 2015 and 2016 drafts. You have to try.
Some of the quarterbacks drafted by other teams in 2015 and ’16 when the Bears were on the signal caller sidelines? Dak Prescott, Carson Wentz, Jared Goff, Jameis Winston, and Marcus Mariotta. None are great and only Prescott, whom the Dallas Cowboys took in the fourth round in 2016, seems to have even an outside shot at the Hall of Fame. And no, just because they were in the draft doesn’t mean the Bears would have gotten them. Other QBs taken in those two drafts include a big batch of the forgotten; Trevor Siemian, Brett Hundley, Bryce Petty, Sean Mannion, Garrett Grayson, Cardale Jones, and a bunch more. The Bears and Pace would not have been better off if they had gotten any of those guys but the mistake Pace made for a half-dozen years and the Bears have made for about a half-century is not valuing the quarterback position, not trying to develop the most valuable job on the field.
Pace took Trubisky in 2017 and gave up the farm to get him. So there is no way he could have selected another quarterback in 2018, right? You just can’t do that, even though Trubisky didn’t impress much in his rookie campaign. But sure you can. Why not?
But Pace also declined to take a QB in 2019 and 2020 when it was clear that Trubisky was likely not going to become the next Dan Marino. The Bears probably would not have been able to land Kyler Murray, Joe Burrow, Tua Tagovoiloa, or Justin Herbert in either of those drafts, no, but you don’t know if you don’t try. But let’s concentrate for a moment on another name: Dwayne Haskins. He was taken by the Washington Redskins (Commanders) with the third overall pick in 2019 out of Ohio State and lasted less than two seasons in Washington. They didn’t like him, for various reasons, so they dumped him.
Yes, you can do that. And Washington replaced him with Taylor Heinicke whom no one had heard of and has played well.
Here’s another name; Josh Rosen. The Arizona Cardinals selected the quarterback with the tenth overall pick in 2018 and dumped him after one season and then drafted Kyler Murray, who’s damn good, while Rosen changes teams every season, not by choice.
Haskins and Rosen were dumped by their teams even after it cost so much to get them and it must be said that Haskins and Rosen are not considered high-character guys whereas Mitch Trubisky, by all accounts, is a great guy. But that doesn’t mean he couldn’t have been dealt a year or two before he was let go.
Matt Nagy’s job was to make Pace look better by making Trubisky play better. He couldn’t do it. Nagy could never accept that Trubisky was not suited to play the style Nagy wanted him to. So Pace went out and got Nick Foles in 2020 to compete with Trubisky. Foles, despite being a former Super Bowl MVP with the Eagles, is not great. He was not even close to the answer.
Then in 2021 Pace signed Andy Dalton, another veteran with some bright spots on his resume but, no, that dog did not hunt or even bark very loud.
And, of course, in 2021 Pace also drafted Ohio State quarterback Justin Fields with the 11th overall pick. Like with Trubisky in 2017, Pace was bold and gave up a lot to get Fields who could turn out to be great. Or not. We don’t know because the Bears were so banged up and rudderless in 2021 it’s difficult to make an honest, sober evaluation of Fields who is a great athlete, a hard worker, smart, and has a championship pedigree and winning attitude.
Ryan Pace could end up being like former Bulls GM Rod Thorn. He’s the one who drafted Michael Jordan. Thorn then left the team and Jerry Krause built the dynasty around MJ. If Fields turns out to be great we’ll be thanking Ryan Pace but that won’t mean the Bears made a mistake by firing him. It took Pace seven years to finally get it right if, indeed, he did, and that’s too long and there is little else at Halas Hall to build on.
Kevin White, Adam Shaheen, Jonathan Bullard, Daniel Braverman, Tarik Cohen, Anthony Miller, Javon Wims, Nick Foles, Andy Dalton, Cody Parkey, and Jimmy Graham. These are just some of the draft picks and free agents that Pace either selected or traded for and/or gave large contracts to and they didn’t pan out.
And let’s not forget, nobody, nobody, nobody, and nobody. Those are the names of the quarterbacks he didn’t take or trade for most of the time.
Pace had many successes: Khalil Mack, Akiem Hicks, Roquan Smith, David Montgomery, Darnell Mooney, Khalil Herbert, Jakeem Grant, and Robert Quinn all come to mind. But there were far more misses than hits.
Pace’s biggest stumble was probably at quarterback, or it might have been at coach. Of course, those two usually depend on each other.
Pace’s first hire, John Fox, came to Chicago with a good reputation. He had coached in a Super Bowl (and lost) and was the first Bears head coach in memory (ever?) to have been a prominent head coach somewhere else. But Fox fizzled quickly and the longer Pace’s tenure lasted the more talk there was that he didn’t even want Fox, but was pressured into the hire by the people who had just hired him.
So, in 2018 he hired Matt Nagy away from the Chiefs. Nagy’s job was to build a team around Trubisky and, having learned from Andy Reid in Kansas City, shouldn’t he have been able to do so? That first season it looked like it. The Bears went 12-4 and made the playoffs. And lost.
But then defensive coordinator Vic Fangio left and the Bears D went from great to ordinary. And Nagy seemed to think, as the “Chicago Sun-Times” recently pointed out, that instead of realizing his team had to get better, especially on offense, he was only a tweak or two away from building a dynasty. Nagy lost some of us in the 2019 preseason when Trubisky and other Bears starters spent most of their time on the sidelines, acting like a bunch of 35-year-olds coming off a second straight Super Bowl victory. Nagy insisted over and over during the 2019 training camp that a few more snaps wouldn’t make a difference for Trubisky then, when most Bears fans seemed to think their team was embarking on a Super Bowl march, the Bears went out and stunk up the place.
They went 8-8 in 2019, then 8-8 again in 2020 while both times looking more like 5-11. They were not good. But, for the most part, they were close. They hung in there. And some of us thought more than once that because of that competiveness, because of the fire, the enthusiasm, the bravado, the close shaves, that maybe Nagy really was a good coach, just not a good play caller, which was supposed to be his specialty.
Whatever. It didn’t work. The Bears looked miserable for most of 2021. They looked doomed. Undisciplined. Fields showed signs of brilliance, and there were some reasons to hope, but not nearly enough reasons to retain Pace or Nagy.
So, Bears chairman George McCaskey fired them. Then he said he had complete confidence in Bears President Ted Phillips to choose new people to turn the Bears around. This is the same Ted Phillips who has had very little success in his several decades running the team. Phillips did bring in GM Jerry Angelo and head coach Lovie Smith nearly twenty years ago and that combo took the Bears to three playoff appearances and a Super Bowl. But Phillips has otherwise had no success. Lovie Smith was fired nearly a decade ago and the Bears have been floundering ever since.
Phillips and McCaskey then conducted an exhaustive search, so they say, after ousting Ryan and Matt and ended up hiring, Ryan and Matt. Ryan Poles is the new Bears GM, coming over from the front office of the Kansas City Chiefs. (Do you get the feeling sometimes that people in Kansas City are laughing at us?)
Poles turned around and hired Matt Eberflus as the Bears’ new head coach, leaving his post as defensive coordinator of the Indianapolis Colts.
Yawn and yawn. Question and query.
Who are Poles and Eberflus? They’re guys. They’re just guys. They’re guys we never heard of before December. Not that we remember, anyway. They have credentials, they have resumes, they have the same experiences that about 150 other people in NFL circles possess. Many people have said very nice things about both of them since their hiring, as we’d expect, but what can we anticipate from gentlemen who have never held these positions before and we’ve never heard of?
If they’d come from the Green Bay Packers or the Baltimore Ravens, the University of Alabama, the University of Clemson, or the University of Georgia, we’d excuse their anonymity. But they don’t.
Seriously, the Colts?
OK, the Chiefs are the cream of the crop but is that because of their front office or because of Andy Reid? We may find out.
Jim Harbaugh, Brian Flores, Byron Leftwich, Eric Bieniemy (yes, Chiefs)Nick Saban, Bill Belichick, Vince Lombardi, Knute Rockne, come on, kids, somebody! Some big name would have excited us, pumped us up, made us reach for the Visa for season tickets or at least subscribed to NFL Network.
Poles and Eberflus might be great. We don’t know. And maybe we should have devoted far more space, time, and energy on them but it’s tough to type about what you don’t know (insert your joke here.)
What we do know is that the same Bears brass that has blundered for a decade or, really, since 1986, is still in charge and the future looks like a very large mirror.
In a funhouse.
At midnight.
In February.
Go Bears. Believe in big things.
Anyway…the 2021 NFL season ended with the Rams beating the Bengals in the Super Bowl capping off a terrific NFL postseason. We admit we don’t like it when pro sports leagues just let more and more teams into the postseason but the NFL, as it usually does, guessed right. This postseason had a true tournament feel. It was more like college basketball than pro football, in a good way, with great games and a true test of stamina and talent to determine the best team. Was that team the Rams? Sure, why not? But we also salute the Bengals, a team the Bears beat way back in September, a week after losing to the Rams. The Bengals are not a great team but they got to the big game fair and square and don’t bet that quarterback Joe Burrow won’t get them back there again soon, even in a stacked AFC.
....Devin Hester should have been voted into the Hall of Fame. The former Bear was the greatest return specialist in NFL history. He changed the game. He was more fun to watch than most quarterbacks and running backs put together and set to music. The Hall of Fame voters are idiots. Greatness should not have to wait. Devin should be wearing gold. Now. --TK
Wednesday, February 16, 2022