Anybody who has followed the Chicago Sun-Times when it comes to sports for long enough has heard the name Rick Telander. The man is an award-winning columnist for the newspaper who made his name covering the Chicago sports. He’s seen the best and worst when it comes to the Bears. So it was a bit of an event when the respected writer made Ryan Pace his target in a recent column.
Keep in mind he had glowing praise for Theo Epstein just a few weeks ago. So it’s clear he wasn’t in a charitable mood when the time arrived to discuss the GM. Telander easily could’ve lambasted all the mistakes made in the past calendar year or been the 246,583rd person to point out how bad of a mistake Mitch Trubisky was. It wasn’t about that though. For him, the bigger problem about this 2020 season and how it’s gone incredibly wrong is elsewhere.
It is more about Pace’s enduring silence.
“The times cry out for a big statement from the man who orchestrated this mess afield, from the man who hired coach Matt Nagy, traded for high-priced defender Khalil Mack, picked quarterback Mitch Trubisky in the 2017 draft and brought in Nick Foles as a hopeful but failed offensive savior…
Mr. Pace, sir?
Nothing.
Meanwhile, Nagy and Trubisky are left to twist in the wind, facing the media, trying to answer the unanswerable.”
Understand that the Bears went from 5-1 to 5-7 in the space of seven weeks. Their current six-game losing streak is the biggest in 18 years. This collapse might be the biggest in team history, rivaling the 1989 team that started 4-0 only to finish 6-10. Pace has a hand in all of it. His blockbuster signing of Robert Quinn is proving a disaster as the pass rusher has just one sack. Jimmy Graham has five TD catches but has been silent for weeks.
Trubisky flopped. The Nick Foles trade didn’t work either. Pace gambled everything on 2020 being a rebound year and it’s blowing up in his face. Yet he continues to let Nagy take all the hits for him.
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Ryan Pace will have to face the music sooner or later
If anything him not being in front of the cameras and more vocal about the situation tells the whole story. Back in 2014, Phil Emery was nowhere to be found as the team crumbled down the stretch to one of the ugliest finishes in franchise history. Right after the season ended, he was fired by the McCaskeys. That speaks volumes about Pace’s likely status. If he had a certain future with the team, it is likely they’d let him speak publicly about it.
The silence is deafening and sends a pretty clear message. It is likely Pace’s last words to the public will be his exit press conference after the season ends. Just like Emery six years ago. Telander is right to criticize him for not addressing this mess, but the reality is it doesn’t matter. Whatever chances Ryan Pace had to do something about it were wasted. There is no diverting this train from the destination now.
Pace will have his day of reckoning soon enough.
After that, it will once again fall to the McCaskeys to somehow figure this mess out. One can only hope that they somehow either take the right advice or just get lucky. Maybe they stop trying to be cute about their hires and simply go after the most qualified candidate. Pace wasn’t the worst they ever had at that job, but he should teach them plenty of valuable lessons about what not to look for.
