This Chicago Bears Offensive Misery Was Years In The Making
People are struggling to find the source of why the Chicago Bears offense is so bad. Some are blaming the coaching staff for their conservative approach. Offensive coordinator Luke Getsy is under fire for not letting quarterback Justin Fields throw the football. The problem is that the poor guy gets either hit or sacked whenever he does. Fields has been sacked 11 times just in the past two games. No, this isn’t a coaching issue. It’s time to accept a fundamental truth.
The Bears just aren’t talented enough.
They don’t have enough bodies on that side of the ball to make things happen in this league. The NFL has a grading scale for talent levels. Blue chip players are Pro Bowlers. Red chip players are solid starters. Green and yellow chips are decent backups and emergency backups. Look at the primary 11 starters for this offense and be honest with yourselves. How many of them are of the blue or red chip variety? Two with David Montgomery and Darnell Mooney. Maybe three with Cody Whitehair. That’s it.
One person being blamed for this mess is GM Ryan Poles. He didn’t do nearly enough to fix the problem during the off-season. Sure, maybe he could’ve done a few things differently, but the reality is he didn’t create this dumpster fire. He inherited it. The genesis of this constant misery was something that began eight years ago.
Here is a list of every offensive player they have drafted since 2014.
Kindly note that only one player from that list drafted between 2014 and 2019 remains on the roster. The rest were cut or traded. Four of them were 1st or 2nd round picks. Nothing sums up the Bears’ situation better than that. Every time they took a big swing, they whiffed.
The last good Chicago Bears offense was in 2013.
It’s not a coincidence why that was the case. The primary contributors to that group were good draft picks. Matt Forte was a 2nd round pick in 2008. Alshon Jeffery was a 2nd round pick in 2012. Kyle Long was a 1st round pick who went to the Pro Bowl as a rookie. Success tends to follow when you draft well on a particular side of the ball, even if the coaching isn’t always the best. If Marc Trestman can produce a top 10 offense, that tells you how talented the Bears were at that time.
That is the mess the new Chicago Bears regime sits in. They don’t have a Forte, Jeffery, Long, or Brandon Marshall. They don’t have a Martellus Bennett. It is time to accept that reality. Justin Fields may or may not be a future franchise quarterback. What we can say for sure is he doesn’t have a lot of help around him to make his life easier. That must start changing next year when the Bears are back in the 1st round.
Poles seems to have a plan.
He’s no longer trading away high draft picks as Ryan Pace did. He’s accumulated a massive amount of salary cap space. There will be significant opportunities to upgrade the roster in the spring. It’s a matter of whether Fields can survive until then.