The Bears are 5–4 but it feels like 0–9. Where do they go from here?
The 2020 Chicago Bears are going nowhere.
A 5–1 start to the season was fun, but an extremely rude awakening was easy to forecast as Chicago entered a murderer’s row of matchups in the middle of the season.
The late Dennis Green once said, ironically of a different iteration of the Chicago Bears, that “they are who we thought they were”.
Never have those words rang true more than over 14 years later. The 2020 Chicago Bears are exactly who we thought they were. A fully, completely, and undoubtedly broken offense paired with an almost depressingly good defense.
And that formula can win games. Hell, the Bears have already put up five of them. But in the modern era of the NFL, exclusively dominated by offense, it’s never going to win a Super Bowl. The 85' Bears are not possible in 2020. The needle is only moved on the offensive side of the ball.
Obviously, the Bears offense falls hopelessly short of being good enough to move that needle. A demoralizingly bleak “performance” against the Titans on Sunday was enough to essentially render that a fact.
There is no immediate fix here. Everything is broken. This is not a case in which pointing at a single culprit is the answer. Fixing a couple loose screws isn’t the solution, the entire offensive machine is dysfunctional and in need of replacement.
The problems start with an offensive line that is an unmitigated disaster, even when fully healthy. The complete absence of depth behind the five starters is now, as fully expected, being completely exposed.
Nick Foles is — shockingly — not the answer under center. The mobility of a tranquilized elephant is a death sentence for a QB sitting behind an offensive line that’s made a habit of surrendering immediate pressure. Even when the line is able to create a clean pocket for Foles, his impressive processor and (usually) consistent accuracy isn’t enough to make up for back-breaking errors caused by inexplicable over-aggressiveness.
Wherever the ghost of Mitchell Trubisky lay inside Halas Hall certainly isn’t the answer either, making the league’s most notoriously difficult to find position at the top of the to-do list when rebuilding this offense.
And then, of course, there is the incomparable Matt Nagy.
He has to go. Forget the consistently confusing game-plans, the perennial ignorance when it comes to playing to the strengths of his personnel, or whatever adjective you’d like to use to describe his play-calling.
Forget all of that. Matt Nagy just isn’t a good football coach. His offense is ridiculously undisciplined and — though he’s spent plenty of time talking about it — has shown no ability to focus on the details and play clean, mistake-free football. It is undoubtedly his biggest flaw and could probably be enough to fire him alone, even without considering the rest of the raging tire fire that has been his performance over the past two seasons.
Can we all just settle on Joe Brady — or literally anyone else — and finally put an end to the mockery that is routinely trying to defend Nagy? His performance has been screaming out to all of us that he isn’t an adequate head coach and it’s time we all start to listen.
The point here is, this offense needs a lot of work and it’s going to take a hell of an effort to get it at the level it needs to be. That, of course, leads us to Ryan Pace.
With former Texans GM Bill O’Brien finally being given the boot earlier in the season, it’s become increasingly difficult not to award Pace with the title of the league’s worst GM.
As we stare one of the league’s three best defenses in the face, that statement feels pretty unjustified. And it’s true, Pace has built up this defense from essentially nothing over his five-year tenure in Chicago. But considering how he built that defense — that is, spending the second-most cap space on that side of the ball in the entire league, as well as throwing four first-round picks and two seconds at it — his accomplishment loses a lot of its luster.
Building one of the league’s best units shouldn’t necessarily be the bare minimum when you throw that many resources into it, and in fairness, Pace has done well acquiring talent over his six years in Chicago. But the very least you should expect of a unit with that kind of payroll is a dominant one, and it’s difficult to imagine that most other GMs across the league couldn’t pull off what Pace was able to. What he did was impressive in a vacuum, but not entirely difficult given the circumstances in which he did it.
What’s even more troubling is that Pace decided to inherit a “spend everything on defense” philosophy now, in an era where the importance of the offensive side of the ball has reached an all-time high.
Again, we are not in 1985. No matter how dominant a defense you build, it’s never going to be good enough to win a Lombardi without a capable offense opposite them. Draining all of your resources on defense and leaving the offense out to dry (Pace has drafted just seven offensive linemen in six drafts) is an alarming misunderstanding of the fundamentals of building an NFL roster.
Pace’s philosophical weaknesses don’t stop there, including a drastic misstep that could very likely end up costing Chicago for years to come.
Beyond any reasonable thought, he inherited a “win now at all costs” mindset entering the 2020 offseason, which — considering the endless array of glaring flaws on offense and the lack of a first-round pick or a boatload of cap space to fix them with — was an asinine conclusion to come too. In doing so, Pace burned a significant portion of the dwindling cap space he had left, a lot of it guaranteed, on aging veterans who were never going to push his team over the top. Adding an above-average edge rusher was never going to suddenly launch a team coming off an 8–8 season into Super Bowl contention. Nor is adding the zombified corpse of Jimmy Graham.
There was nothing Pace could have immediately done to turn the Bears into Super Bowl contenders for the 2020 season given the ridiculous amount of holes on offense and the lack of resources available to fix them. The only thing that signing multiple pricey free agents would do is make the team too good to be in striking distance to acquire a franchise QB through the draft and gutting the team of most of its remaining cap space — a situation that is easily the worst possible place for an NFL franchise to find itself in.
Ideally, you’d hope that Pace would recognize that and stop himself from driving the Bears directly into purgatory, instead opting to immediately begin shipping off veterans to stockpile draft capital to replace them with talented rookies (drafting talent in the late rounds is undoubtedly his biggest strength). This would, of course, mean that Chicago would drastically decrease its chances of sneaking into the 2020 playoffs, but it would also drastically increase their chances of landing a top QB prospect in the 2021 draft. This process would also increase the lifespan of Chicago’s defense long-term and make it cheaper, buying the Bears time to find the answer at QB as well as the other hundred glaring flaws on offense.
That would have been the best-case scenario, but at the very least, Pace needed to understand that setting his remaining cap space on fire by handing out expensive and guaranteed contracts without bothering to address the team’s biggest flaws would be a catastrophic mistake that would set the franchise back for years. He failed to realize that, and now the Bears are stuck in the quicksand that is NFL purgatory, an entirely avoidable fate.
So, to revisit the question this article began with, where should Chicago go from here, there isn’t really a clear answer. It’s what makes being in purgatory so dangerous — there is nowhere to go. Chicago is completely stuck in a rut and often the only sufficient way to dig yourself out of it is by blowing everything up and starting over. That isn’t a fate anyone would like to accept given the sheer dominance of this defense, but it just might be Chicago’s best option moving forward. With such a dysfunctional offense, the only purpose an elite defense truly serves is taking up cap space. Chicago is simply in-able to take any advantage of its vaunted defense, which at some points begs the question if there really is a purpose in paying so much to keep them intact. Willingly dismantling this team and starting again from scratch is undoubtedly going to be an extremely painful process in the short-term, but it’s become increasingly likely that it’s their best option for the long-term.
Will Chicago take that route? It’s impossible to know. But one thing that can definitively be said is they need to clean house this offseason. All Ryan Pace and Matt Nagy have accomplished the past two seasons is proving that they aren’t the right duo to lead the Bears to the promise land, no matter how Chicago plans on getting there.
