Bear(ing) the News – A Chicago Bears Blog

Brad Biggs at the Chicago Tribune answers your questions:

“How do you add talent to this team quickly? Do you think GM Ryan Pace will spend in free agency given how the Bears may have a ton of cap space next year? — @HumanSabre from Twitter”

“There is no quick fix to years and years of poor drafting and developing. I expect the Bears to have oodles of salary cap space after this season. Enough to do whatever Pace wants to in terms of re-signing players currently under contract and pursuing free agents on the open market. But the Dream Team approach rarely nets positive results. The Redskins have been super aggressive in free agency over the years under Daniel Snyder. That hasn’t worked so well.”

Could not agree more. As Biggs points out, Bears free agent signees have rarely made a difference in the win-loss column. Players are available on the street for a reason and that includes the ones that appear from the outside to have worked out.

For instance, Martellus Bennett is a marvelous tight end – a Pro Bowler. But from the rare report in newspapers that address or imply that any player’s behaviour off the field might not be up to snuff, it’s evident that Bennet is immature, has a serious problem with authority and, if we read further between the lines, might allow some of his other interests to distract from football. If you doubt my opinion here, look no further than the fact that the Bears by all reports were trying to trade the undeniably very talented Bennett last spring rather than deal with the headache he’s turned out to be.

Cover of Bennett’s mixed tape Year of the Orange Dinosaur, release in 2014

The Bears need to draft well and draft consistently well. That way they will be using that cap space to extend the players they want to keep rather than having to throw money at other teams’ castoffs.

Rich Campbell at the Chicago Tribune relays comments that Bears offensive coordinator Adam Gase made on Thursday. He discussed why the Bears threw four straight passes against the Packers in the fourth quarter on a goal-to-go set of downs that began at the 6-yard line:

“‘It’s one of those deals you wouldn’t have called them if you didn’t feel great about them,’ he said. ‘You’d like the execution to be a little better. Probably one of those calls I wish I could have had back. But at the end of the day, whatever we end up calling, we’ve talked about it. We’ve worked on it. Nobody should be surprised by those things, and we have to execute them.’

“Which pass did he want back?

“‘I don’t want to tell you,’ he said with a smile.”

It certainly doesn’t have to be done this way but standard red zone procedure at times like this is to run the ball a couple times, then hit the defense with a play action pass, often to the tight end. The Bears were running the ball well and Martellus Bennett was having a reasonably good game. This seemed like a good spot for that.

Hub Arkush at chicagofootball.com puts the average NFL career in perspective with a very thought provoking column:

“What are youth and middle age in the NFL today?

“The NFL Players Association loves to promote the idea of the average career of an NFL player being 3.3 years, but Roger Goodell disagrees.

“The commissioner recently explained the union’s numbers include everybody with a contract but in fact the average career of players who start their rookie seasons on an NFL team’s 53-man roster is just under six years.

“Either way it suggests players need to peak somewhere between their second and fourth seasons.”

The names of the only two Bears players in their fourth season may surprise you: Alshon Jeffery and Shea McClellin. These are players that I think virtually all of us are used to thinking of as young. They’re not. They’re middle aged and arguably on the decline already.

Jeffery is very productive but McClellin is basically still a developmental prospect. Indeed, the Bears are likely starting him over veterans like the released Mason Foster in large part because they believe that he still has a higher ceiling. But does he really?

Hub’s purpose was to point out the players that Bears fans should be following the development of in particular as the future of the franchise – those in their first and second years as pros. These include Kyle Fuller, Ego Ferguson, Will Sutton, Christian Jones, Terrance Mitchell, Eddie Goldman and Jeremy Langford.

But to me it’s a reminder of how terribly far away this team is from building a respectable roster.