John Mullin at CSN Chicago brings up a good point about the Bears search for a quarterback:
“How good is [general manager Ryan Pace] at finding a potential franchise quarterback, given that he’s never picked a quarterback in his two Bears drafts?
“Former GM Jerry Angelo admitted that he and his staff had more than their share of difficulties identifying good offensive linemen in the draft. Maybe it was because Angelo himself was a former college linebacker and defensive lineman; who knows?’
‘Pace is a former college defensive end and his personnel moves on that side of the football have generally been solid – Leonard Floyd, Eddie Goldman, Nick Kwiatkowski, plus free agents Akiem Hicks, Danny Trevathan, Tracy Porter and Jerrell Freeman.
“But can Pace, who certainly knows things about chasing quarterbacks with malicious intent, draft success at the single most important position in perhaps all of sports?’
It’s a legitimate question and it’s not just Pace. He’s working in an organization full of scouts and personnel men who apparently have consistently under-rated and/or failed to understand the position, as demonstrated by the fact that the Bears have so rarely taken one high in the draft and have so rarely been successful if they did. How qualified are they to identify the qualities of a good rookie quarterback? Would they know one if they saw one?
For years I pushed hard for the Bears to hire a head coach with a background in coaching quarterbacks. They eventually did hire one in Marc Trestman and it didn’t work out. But that doesn’t mean I was wrong.
I have no problem with current head coach John Fox, a defensive head coach, mostly because he’s demonstrated elsewhere that he can hire a good offensive staff. Neither offensive coordinator Dowell Loggains nor quarterbacks coach Dave Ragone have ever coached a rookie to a successful NFL career. Now we’re all crossing out fingers and hoping that his judgement that they can, despite the lack of evidence, is sound.
Has Pace earned the same benefit of the doubt?
There’s a lot to like about what’s happening with the Bears right now. And it’s not like bears fans have a choice. You have to have faith and wait and see what happens.
But the number of “ifs” that are stacking up becomes more and more mind boggling the more you think about them. An awful lot of things are going to have to go right with an awful lot of people who have no history of success with the quarterback position if the Bears are going to be able to draft and develop a rookie quarterback along.
Bottom line, I can’t shake the nagging feeling that the Bears as an organization still haven’t set themselves up for success because they continue to under-value the most important position in sports. And that perhaps can be demonstrated no more clearly than when seeing how they’ve set up their organizational structure all the way from the top down.