lostfan

This scenario gets brought up a lot and here is my take on it 1. It's frankly too early to be talking about this. It's still October and there's still a wide range of things that could happen with this team. 2. That said the scenario is kind of fun to think about because if it did happen then it means virtually every card fell the Bears' way: Justin Fields reaches the full potential everyone thought he had Because Fields is good, the Bears have a lower draft pick - we don't know exactly where that is but we know they don't have #1 overall ...but the Panthers do Eberflus and Getsy demonstrate enough competence to keep their jobs 3. This is literally the Holy Grail of rebuilding scenarios, a coup with luck that even Howie Roseman didn't get with the Eagles from the Wentz trade. If you're a Bears fan you're not worried about what happens from here, all your options are good ones. You either trade out of the #1 pick and get a huge haul due to the bidding wars that'll result or you trade Fields (who, in this scenario, is now probably worth at least two first round picks). I do think people are overrating how rare of a prospect Williams is, but that's a separate topic 4. The argument for re-setting the clock on a rookie contract is that once you have to pay him it's more difficult to maintain the rest of the roster, but if you're paying Fields, this is offset by the sheer amount of draft capital you're getting back. You now have (at least) two firsts in '24, two firsts (and the Panthers 2) in '25, and two firsts in '26. At this point you can absorb $40 million, and you don't really have to start worry about roster atrophy from the salary cap for at least 4-5 years.

Watching Jordan Love the past few weeks and I'm bewildered at how the Bears game plan against him let him cook so much. He's been straight buns but they played the most simple defense possible for him, and broke some of those coverages for good measure.

My point is one of these is a physical inability to do something and the other can be learned or coached if a player has the aptitude to do that specific thing. We had a huge sample size to know that Trubisky didn't (and it doesn't matter how much physical talent a guy has which is what I think you're saying) and we don't have that yet with Fields.

That's not accuracy, that's timing and lack of anticipation. It's impossible to play QB in the NFL without accuracy so that's the easy part (I mean, Trubisky is accurate and so was Grossman), doing it in real time with all the parts moving at NFL speed is the hard part. It doesn't matter if you threw it to the exact spot you wanted to when a DB gets there first.

The amount of smoke a QB gets for shitting the bed the way Lamar Jackson just did depends largely on which QB it is, and whether they've reached certain artificial benchmarks in past seasons. Lamar isn't solely responsible for that loss and I'm just using him as an example. There's usually some other thing from earlier in the game someone *else* was responsible for (Zay Flowers catches a wide open pass instead of falling down) that would've made the later mistakes irrelevant but whether people choose to acknowledge this happened depends on the vibes. When Mahomes threw a pick-6 in the first week almost everyone watching it understood he made a throw on the money and Toney tipped it right at the DB, and said so in the commentary after the game. But if it had been Daniel Jones, Kirk Cousins, or even Dak Prescott doing the exact same thing? It'd just be a bunch of jokes and mocking.

He's always been accurate and he's always had great ball placement, that's never been the issue with him (except that throw on the run to Herbert last night that was so bad he broke Herbert, but that was an anomaly. 3 yards to the left and that's a huge gain and probably a TD). WHEN he's able to identify the throw, he'll let it rip and the throw is money. He just hasn't always been able to see those throws in time or know what specifically to do on a play. It's just a relief to see that Fields, at least for now, is not actually dead in the water, and does have NFL talent.

Dude is built like Randy Moss, but stronger, and plays like he is built like Simone Biles (Simone would play with more heart though, I'm certain). Biggest p**** I've ever seen in a Bears uniform. He is down there with Anthony Miller for Bears players I hate most.

Bears got very close during the Lovie era and were legitimately good in 2018 before the wheels came off on the Nagy era. They draft Mahomes and we may be having an entirely different discussion

In my lifetime (41 years) it definitely is. There have been times where the teams were individually worse (except the Sox, this is probably the worst they've ever been, and potentially the Bears too) or have been bad for longer periods of time, but never all at the same time. -Until the Hahn era the Sox were always generally above-average at worst, and at least had a handful of good (sometimes excellent or historically notable) players. Currently fucking awful -The Cubs (until the last decade or so and obviously 2016) had a notorious track record of failure, even their fans would admit this -The Bears cycle between years-long periods of dormancy and relevance (sometimes accidentally being good off the sheer number of times they have to keep starting over), but even so they've produced multiple Hall of Famers during this period. Currently the in the Browns/Lions category of NFL laughingstock until further notice -The Blackhawks were good when I was younger, then a laughingstock for an extended period of time, then ran the 2010s, good times (major caveat of the sexual assault scandal, however). Currently transitioning, so they're bad, but arrow pointing up -The Bulls, no explanation needed, but currently stuck in NBA hell indefinitely as a fringe playoff team at best with no end in sight

Yeah, and Poles drafts that (clearly heavily favors guys with a high RAS) and I blame Eberflus for this more. Emery would draft guys to play in a versatile defensive scheme and then Trestman just had them playing the most vanilla 4-3 schemes there were

Poles and Eberflus do seem out of sync in the same way that Emery and Trestman were. Emery had an solid idea about how to build a team on a macro level but it seemed like he was just kinda taking guys he liked in the draft (the "best player available" that draft nerds bring up ad nauseam every spring, I guess, but that no successful team actually does) apparently without consideration for an actual evaluation of that contract against how the coach actually wants to use him. Why, for example, would you take Tyrique Stevenson if Eberflus is just gonna have him playing zone with no pass rush? Doesn't make sense. I'm sure he had a reason but it's not a good reason.

I don't think I posted in this thread but I do remember seeing it and thinking "yeah, that checks out" I didn't believe in this team after seeing them lay down and die last season, they didn't get better in the offseason, and this year's team picked up right where that one left off (except they still had much further to fall, last year they were magnetically drawn to being .500 as if it was nature forcing them to).

I hated the John Fox hire so much. About the only thing good from that time was that he had a lot of good connections so the Gase/Fangio combination was good, and Gase got a good year out of Cutler, but he got hired away after a year so it was a moot point. Sure, he did bring some stability back to the team after it collapsed under Trestman, but any decently qualified coach could've done that. Fox was the same coach from Carolina that was stuck in the 90s and he lucked into Peyton Manning having a career resurgence in Denver, that had f*** all to do with his influence there (in fact I think his conservative coaching style held them back in the playoffs, if anything).

Off the top of my head his free agent decisions have mostly been disastrous, I really can't think of any that have been worth a s%*#. Nate Davis I'll give a pass for because he's been dealing with a personal situation. Now, in Pole's defense, he did inherit a draft with depleted capital and was strapped for cash in his first year but it's more about where he put all his priorities. What's the point in getting rid of all your best defenders if you do nothing with all the free cap space you had?

I posted this in a twitter thread then a longer version on fb so I'll just copy/paste it here As a general principle you can't (or shouldn't) fire a GM in the NFL, or any sport really, after the amount of time Ryan Poles has been employed by the Bears, because you're asking them to work on a multi-year time frame and it's not reasonable to judge them against that in such a short amount of time. With that being said, if you *were* eventually firing him, he's already checked most of the boxes. For example -He traded Roquan Smith. In a vacuum, this is defensible, you don't really want to pay an off-ball LB that much money, he's someone who needs to play in a 2-gap system, a 2nd round pick is really good value. But what does Poles do after this? He cancels it out by giving the Steelers his own 2nd (that ends up higher) for Chase Claypool, who does f*** all, and then paying an off-ball LB almost as much as Roquan wanted, instead of... -...investing in the defensive line and pass rush. Remember, when Poles took over, this wasn't barren, clearing it out to start over was a choice he made - to save a bunch of money he ended up not spending -And why couldn't he use Roquan in the first place? Because he hired a mid ass defensive coordinator as head coach who runs an antiquated scheme that Roquan doesn't fit in when you have an inexperienced 2nd year QB you *immediately* neglect. And when I say "neglect" I mean literally didn't do a FUCKING thing for until the following offseason -His head coach's chosen offensive coordinator and QB are a square peg and a round hole. This is obvious to everyone except him (and his head coach). The only things I believe I can say in Eberflus's defense are that, yes, I understand this wasn't a one-year plan, and that his draft picks still have time to pan out, but Phil Emery was fired for less.

Cover 2 is one of any number of defensive alignments in football and all the other ones require you to have the right players too (there are ZERO of them that work without a pass rush). I never understood that specific complaint about the Tampa 2, Bears fans just have some kind of collective trauma from the Lovie years where the defense had to always be perfect or they would lose games I guess. It's just right now, the Bears are using the worst possible combination. There are ways to try to help with a weak pass rush (man coverage, press, blitzing, etc) but they're just playing a lot of zone and giving the QB all day to eat it alive.

This is a pretty good discussion with a lot of good questions asked about Pace's regime and what they were thinking when they drafted Trubisky and then Fields. If you don't feel like watching the video: -In 2017 they were only looking at Trubisky and Mahomes. They were never looking at Watson because they didn't believe the way he made unscripted plays would translate to the NFL. Lucas also believed Mahomes was a legit talent but did not have him ranked ahead of Trubisky for basically the same reason - Mahomes is a wizard and he wasn't sure he would be able to pull those plays off in the NFL (obviously they were all wrong about this). Trubisky is very intelligent and understands all the concepts for every play, what the defense is doing, what his checks are, etc. but it did not translate well into live action (he mentions that around this time, the S2 tests were new and people didn't trust them, but they are very accurate at measuring this). - They thought the Browns were going to take either Trubisky or Myles Garrett and if Trubisky had gone, they would have gotten Mahomes (trading up if necessary). Lucas also believes Mahomes is a transcendent talent and he may or may not have been a candidate for best QB ever on the Bears, but he's too talented for the Bears to ruin him. -Fast forward to 2021 and they have the QBs ranked Lawrence, Fields, Jones, Wilson, Lance. Fields scored high on the S2 test (not the highest, but very high) indicating they felt it was likely that whatever deficiencies he had with processing plays was something he could overcome, along with his physical tools. Lucas is stunned that Fields looks this bad, and also believes his confidence is shot and that all the swag he had from his rookie year is gone.

The Bears are at 2008 Lions, 2017 Browns levels of bad right now (although granted, 41-10 is about the ass whipping I expected them to get, so I'm really not even mad about it). I won't see any way they can win a game this season until they do it. Fields is a shell of even his rookie self now. He's looking like Trey Lance.

To my half-assed informed eye it seems that his weakness was in recognizing when to take short yardage and then they overcorrected, and now he doesn't trust what he sees. I'm sure it's probably deeper than that but that's how it looks to me.

I know that it kind of breaks a taboo for Justin Fields to be talking about the coaches, and I know also that the headlines stripped out the context of why he was saying that (and that he accepted accountability for his own poor play), but I'm okay with him standing up for himself here. He didn't let that narrative take hold because he's a team-first guy with a strong work ethic, but he really said nothing wrong, and nothing that a bunch of people weren't already noticing or commenting on. There really is no other explanation for why he is suddenly having so much more trouble seeing guys who are wide open than he was before. There were some throws against Tampa that would have been so easy that he wouldn't really deserve much credit for making them.

Let's assume for a moment that Alan Williams really is resigning for health and family reasons, there is a long list of people he should be suing. All that whirlwind about everyone speculating on twitter for all these crimes he may or may not have committed were actually just one guy making unfounded claims it looked like he made up, and other random people just running with it for clicks (pretending they had sources other than this guy's tweet). That stuff finally started deflating when actual reporters started asking questions and got categorical denials from everyone involved.

Tim Jenkins here says the footwork change they did dramatically slowed down his dropback and processing, so he's playing really slow now, and it's exacerbating everything else.

Yeah, *worst case* that's 1st and goal. If he can't see that throw to make there's no helping him, this wasn't even some complex throw where you had to know coverages or anything. Now, granted, he was never *this* bad before, but still. Why is he just freezing up? What's happening in his head?

It's the celebration after with his back turned to the refs immediately throwing two flags that really sells this for me. He genuinely thought he had a sack but Goff had gotten rid of the ball like 17 minutes ago