Kevin White injury highlights Bears issues on and off the field
By Tom Roper
Kevin White was one of the highest and fastest risers of the 2015 NFL Draft, his glowing senior season and extremely impressive tangibles saw the weapon-needy Chicago Bears sign off on his name with the seventh overall pick, now it may all be over before it’s even started. White has been confirmed to be suffering from a stress fracture on his shin shortly after the Bears start to pre-season, that was then followed the next day by news from Bears general manager Ryan Pace that White would require surgery and wouldn’t just miss the expected six or seven weeks to recover from such an injury, but potentially the season.
The impact of this injury is significant for the team on the field but also the handling of how it came about. The Bears are less than six months into the new partnership of general manager Pace and head coach John Fox, after dispensing with the services of Phil Emery and Marc Trestman at the end of last season after failing to reach the play-off’s yet again. White, regardless of his current future status, is going to remain Pace’s number one pick, the player’s name on everyone’s lips when they look back over his tenure. As far as I’m concerned the Bears absolutely made the right pick, and an injury of his nature is an inevitability in this sport, you can’t control that, you just have to protect the players as much as you can during practice and, frankly, hope for the best. When it does happen though, how you manage it publicly can say a lot about you as a general manager and Pace has not fared so well there.
First of all this injury happened during the OTAs. They precede training camp which means the Bears have known about this injury for some time. White wasn’t running during camp and naturally it caught press attention, the Bears denied anything serious was up, putting White’s limited participation down to a niggles and that they were maintaining a typical schedule for that would have him up and running soon, literally. Then last Friday, after the Bears 27–10 win over the Miami Dolphins Pace attended a charity event and spoke to some reporters where he further continued to back his organization’s claims the injury wasn’t that serious, he even went as far as to state that it “adamantly wasn’t a stress fracture” and he’d have “been on the field Thursday” if it was up too him. Just over 24 hours later Pace is not only breaking the news to the whole world that it is indeed a stress fracture but that also White might miss the whole season, he followed this up with an internal press conference in which he freely admitted they had known since before training camp that it was a stress fracture, they had hoped it would heal, that hadn’t worked out and it had taken White to notify them of this week when he pulled up running in practice and that he would start the season on the physically unable to participate list.
It doesn’t matter which way you try to cut this, it looks more and more like not only did the Bears flat-out lie but that they got their young wide receiver to do the same and when he slipped the tightly controlled net and made the comments he did on Friday, they had to act and try to get ahead of a story they have been needlessly and foolishly trying to hide. Fox has kept his Bears off-season and training camps a tight ship, especially around his rookies who rarely talk to the press as it is and now many will start to wonder exactly why. Why hide this injury? They are unavoidable, we have already seen the same happen with another first-round pick this year in Dante Fowler Jnr.
Yes, the media over-scrutinize and some are always susceptible to start labelling busts when this kind of thing happens but that’s just a reality of the game, Fox’s explanation that this is the price of doing business in this game and with this media seems to suggest he is playing them at their own game which is all very well and good but he, Pace and the organization have also lied incessantly to the fan-base and have also expected their young player to lie for them and himself. They have put him in a very difficult position where his credibility is now up for question and that is not a good job for protecting his reputation, forget just his body. It’s poor public relations all round and it’s gained them absolutely nothing. If it was designed not to cause too much panic around the roster they must have known the risk that at some point the news would be bad and come out so why not get it out early? It doesn’t really make any sense and it does have all the signs and feelings of an inexperienced general manager and a stingy and stubborn head coach who thought they could completely control this story and given it is their role to manage and handle these situations, both privately and publicly, they have not done at all well here. It seems that by letting the kid out of their sight for a few minutes he blew the line and from that point onwards only hastened truth in yet another scripted event with the media was the way forward whilst trying to remain completely ignorant of all that had come and been said before, as if it never even happened.
That’s the public face of White’s injury, on the field side of things it’s obviously a potentially huge loss. White may have been a rookie yet to take a pro snap but he was expected to feature regularly in his rookie season and trying not to speak too soon, follow in the footsteps perhaps of the likes of Mike Evans from last season in terms of impact for their offenses. White was drafted to help fill the void left by Brandon Marshall. The Bears have also lost Alshon Jeffery to a calf injury and whilst he is expected to be fit for week one there are no guarantees on his level of readiness, nor are there now in what the Bears have to say in his progress. Having Jay Cutler as your franchise quarterback doesn’t do much to reassure either; Cutler is inconsistent enough with stud receivers let alone rookies and he is hardly walking into games with two touchdowns on his shoulders. Before regular season has even started the Bears offense already looks weak at the knees and there will be a lot of pressure and expectation on versatile running back Matt Forte to recapture previous form if the Bears are to have a serious chance competing in an offense-heavy NFC North this season, as well as on Pace and Fox to start hunting around late in the day now to try to find receivers who can make a difference in games through their own skill-sets, rather than those of others around them. Reality is though it’s hard not to see another damp squib for the Bears this year.
We certainly hope that White makes a swift recovery and that we see him in a Bears uniform in the future. He was a tremendous player in college and you look at his potential for this level and feel he has one of the best shots at succeeding, maybe he personally will have learned a lesson from the Bears incompetency in how they have handled his first set of headlines in the NFL. For the Bears it leaves them an organization fresh with change but still with lots to prove on and off the field and before they have even taken to the new season a couple of black marks are already against their name. There is certainly some work to do in Chicago.
Tom Roper is a featured writer for UKEndZone. If you have any questions or plain disagree, you can find Tom on Twitter @TomRoper87, or join in the conversation @UKEndZone, in the comment section below or on our Facebook Page.
