Bears Must Draft a Quarterback at Three Overall

Brad Biggs at the Chicago Tribune gives 13 reasons why the Bears will want to draft a quarterback in the first round:

If not now, when?

The time to invest a first-round draft pick in a quarterback appears to have come for the Bears, who have not selected a passer in Round 1 since Rex Grossman in 2003. The Bears dealt two first-round picks to the Broncos in the 2009 Jay Cutler deal, a trade that proved to be too good to be true because teams don’t deal away franchise quarterbacks.

It took the Bears longer than most to realize Cutler wasn’t that player, and now here they are with the No. 3 pick Thursday night, staring down the opportunity to solve their never-ending issue — if they can pick the right quarterback.

I couldn’t agree more.

The Bears aren’t currently developing a quarterback. They have failed to even attempt to draft one for years now. That must end here. Quarterback is the only position that you absolutely cannot do without to achieve consistent success. That has now been proven over and over again.

You have to take your swings at the position and you have to take guys who have a shot at actually being good. That means early in the draft and, this year, that means the first round. How do I know that?

A couple weeks ago I participated in a mock draft.   Representatives for each team drafted who they wanted in the proper order and trades were allowed. They were, of course, extremely knowledgable about their teams current situation and thinking.

My plan going in was probably what many of you are thinking. Assuming I couldn’t trade down (I tried), I would take the best defensive player available, then take the best quarterback available in the second round or trade up into the tail end of the first round to get the third or fourth best available (likely Patrick Mahomes or Deshone Kizer). So I took defensive end Soloman Thomas and felt pretty good about it.

And then I watched as my world slowly fell apart. It started at the 7th pick where Cleveland traded up to take Mahomes. Crazy, right? Could have maybe even waited for the second to get that guy, right?

Wrong.

The quarterbacks few off the board like pigeons getting out of the way of a speeding car. Arizona took Deshaun Watson at 13. Carson Palmer is aging but you probably figured that they’d wait and take a long-term project later. And you would have been wrong. Same with Kansas City, who traded up to 22 to get Mitchell Trubisky. Then Houston took Deshone Kizer at 25 and you were left with… who?

At that point there was one quarterback left that I thought might – maybe – turn into a good starter, Davis Webb. And I had both New Orleans at 32 and SanFransisco at 34 drafting ahead of me. There was no way I could possible wait and take the chance that I’d be drafting a Nate Peterman at the top of the second round. So I had to trade a fourth round pick to move up from 36 to 30 to get what amounted ot the dregs of the starting quarterback class.

I hear over and over again that you don’t “reach” for a quarterback. But if the rest of the league values the position more than you do, as was definitely the case with me in this mock draft, are you reaching or are you undervaluing the prospects and their potential impact?

The draft is always a crap shoot. It’s even more of one when it comes to quarterbacks. That’s the way it is. There’s a rookie cap so it isn’t like you set your franchise back 5 years by missing on a one in the first round anymore. You take your swings until you find one. If that means taking one that you like best at 3 overall, so be it. And that certainly looks like that’s the case this year.