How Did the Bears Get Here?

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Photo: Evan Siegle - packers.com

Kenny Clark vs. Bears Oct. 17, 2021

Kenny Clark vs. the Bears on Oct. 17, 2021

On Sunday Night, a well-rested Packers’ team will take on their oldest rival, which just happens to be one of the most dysfunctional franchises in sports. While the Lions may be objectively worse, their unabashed tanking is being done with real purpose. The Lions, at least, have modern ideas, even if they still lack for execution.

The Bears’ problems run deeper. This is a team that has had some success, with their Super Bowl win in the 1985 season, featuring one of the greatest defenses ever, and their Super Bowl loss to the Colts in the 2006 season, featuring another historically good defense, but it’s never sustained. The Bears are without question the most old-school team in the NFL. They have old-school owners who are still the descendants of George Halas, they play into the idea that cold Midwest football has to be based on running and defense, and they have largely eschewed all of the recent knowledge we’ve developed about the most efficient ways to create a football team. Most importantly, no team has had a worse quarterback situation over their entire history than Chicago, and they’ve done themselves no favors in their last two attempts to right the ship.

The current Bears’ GM is Ryan Pace, and all recent Bear problems start with Pace, not with head coach Matt Nagy. The NFL draft is essentially a crapshoot, and no individual team has shown a particular skill for choosing better players over the long haul. The single biggest determining factors on a successful draft are the number of picks a team has in the first four rounds, and in Pace’s tenure, only the Buffalo Bills have had fewer picks, with 23, than the Bears have had (24). Pace seems to trade away picks without a second thought, as he did to move up one spot for Mitch Trubisky, and to acquire Khalil Mack, and to move up in the draft to select running back David Montgomery. In doing so, he robbed the Bears of any ability to build depth, and fix key weaknesses on the offensive line, and on defense, where the Bears’ talent base has been slowly eroding for years.

Pace also pays little attention to positional value in the draft, and here, the old school has really bitten the Bears. In his tenure the team has spent exactly one high pick on an offensive lineman, and that was just this year, nabbing tackle Teven Jenkins with the 39th overall pick. Setting aside that most analysts thought the Jenkins pick to be a reach, and that Jenkins started the year on IR, missing most of the season with a back injury, the line has declined so much that adding a single high pick would barely matter.

Wasting Resources

While Pace let the line decline, he was more than happy to spend high capital on running backs, generally considered to be the least valuable position in the draft. In 2019 Pace traded up into the 3rd to draft David Montgomery, but he’s also used 4th round picks on Tarik Cohen, and Jeremy Langford. Running backs are luxury picks, and having a solid offensive line is almost a prerequisite for generating success. Over Pace’s tenure, only Baltimore and Washington have spent more high picks on running backs, and given that the Bears only had 24 picks in that time frame, it’s an inexcusable use of resources.

The biggest issue for the Bears is quarterback development, and here they’ve made the same mistake twice. Mitchell Trubisky, selected with the 2nd overall pick in 2017, actually showed promise in his rookie season, but regressed every subsequent season under head coach Matt Nagy. Trubisky is at his best when he can make use of his mobility and make plays outside the pocket. Nagy’s strength, to the extent he has any, is in calling plays for a pure pocket passer, and his attempts to fit Trubisky to his style failed miserably. Prior to drafting Trubisky, the Bears spent significant money to bring in quarterback Mike Glennon, who fits the Nagy mold, and Nagy was purportedly surprised at the drafting of Trubisky.

Trading Up

In the 2021 draft, the Bears once again traded up for Ohio State’s Justin Fields, and again, have managed to completely botch the situation. Pace and Nagy both entered the season on the hot seat and well aware of it. To fill the gap at quarterback, they first signed Andy Dalton to a $10 million contract, and sent a 4^th round pick to Jacksonville for Nick Foles. Foles and Dalton are roughly equivalent in terms of talent, and fit Nagy’s system reasonably well, but acquiring both of them for significant capital put them in a bind with Fields.

The smart thing to do with a young quarterback, if possible, is to invest in tools like a strong offensive line, and dependable receivers, to help him succeed, while understanding that any rookie is likely to struggle in year one. With Nagy and Pace needing to win or be fired, they instead chose to go with Dalton in an attempt to have a winning season and save their jobs. This plan blew up spectacularly as Dalton was injured in Week 2 against Cincinnati. If the Bears planned to take the sit-and-learn approach with Fields, the smart thing to do would have been to play Foles. Instead, they went with Fields, despite the fact that he hadn’t taken first team reps in the preseason, and frankly, wasn’t prepared.

I believe the best way to prepare a rookie quarterback is to play them right away, but the one thing you can’t do is get your rookie killed behind a poor line. Fields holds the ball too long, and doesn’t do himself any favors, but Chicago’s line, combined with Nagy’s lack of creativity on offense has led to Fields being sacked on an insane 13.5% of his drop backs. Getting hit creates bad habits, and most of the young quarterbacks to take a similar number of hits (most notably David Carr and Tim Couch) don’t work out.

Fields is in a bad spot, but it was a mistake for Ryan Pace to allow a lame duck coach who already failed with a highly drafted quarterback, to have this responsibility. Developing a young quarterback is even more important than selecting the right quarterback, and there is almost no chance that the current Bears situation would allow for that development. Fields has many of the markers of college quarterbacks likely to succeed in the NFL. He was extremely accurate in college, his underlying metrics were strong, and he’s an exceptional athlete to boot. He belongs in a creative offense that can make use of all of his tools.

The Packers are heavy favorites this Sunday, and with good reason. It looks like Andy Dalton will start, but the writing is on the wall for Chicago. Their season is over, they have almost no depth, and their cap situation is poor. There is no future for the Bears, and once the players and coaches know this, it can make for some ugly games.