Ryan Pace made plenty of mistakes that resulted in the Chicago Bears going from an up-and-coming contender to rebuilding in three years. Most will pinpoint his misguiding drafting of Mitch Trubisky and the hiring of Matt Nagy as head coach as the decisive turning points. That is entirely fair. Yet people might not be talking enough about how egregiously he mismanaged the team’s offensive line during the second half of his tenure.
Former offensive lineman Ross Tucker took his opportunity to bring that to light during his recent interview on Parkins & Spiegel for 670 The Score. Tucker hasn’t been shy in sharing his opinion of the Bears’ offensive line. He thinks it is one of the worst in the NFL this year and will need time to recover. Much blame must be directed at Pace for his baffling decisions over the past few years. None more so than the double move of cutting Charles Leno Jr. and trying to replace him with Teven Jenkins.
Ryan Pace never paid enough attention to the O-line.
The criticism is warranted. Cutting Leno for cap space was necessary due to the cap drop from 2020. Yet it is amazing to think Pace’s best solution to the problem was drafting a college right tackle to fill that void despite knowing he was coming into the NFL with an injured back. Then when Jenkins injured it again, the team was forced to lure Jason Peters out of retirement to mitigate the damage. The Bears ended up surrendering 58 sacks last year.
In truth, this disaster was a long time coming. During his GM tenure, Ryan Pace showed a concerning lack of interest in the offensive line. Across seven total drafts he conducted from 2015 to 2021, he selected eight offensive linemen. None of them were 1st rounders, and half of them came in the 5th round or later. It should never have been a surprise the Bears ended up struggling in the trenches during most of that run.
Now Ryan Poles is left trying to pick up the pieces. He grabbed four offensive linemen in the 2022 draft. Hopefully, two of them can become decent contributors. Don’t expect the moves to stop there. Poles is a former offensive lineman himself. He will devote far more resources to the position than Pace ever did. Maybe then Justin Fields can become the player he should be.
Pace came from an organization, NO Saints, that stressed the OL. Why is shifted his perspective is truly an unknown.
Trubisky put up 35 against backups and is still in competition with kenny Pickett. He’s not in a nagy situation where he’s gonna just be handed the job cuz he’s not the rookie
Unless Tevin Jenkins himself tells me otherwise, on Zoom or something, no email, but face to face, I will go to my grave believing that Jenkins’ second back injury, the one in OTAs, was stress related; the root cause was seeing Matt Nagy at work and being overwhelmed by a persistent, chronic, WTF-Attack, wondering what the weirdo was even trying to do!
Remember, it was Nagy’s third attempt in three years at advancing to the genius level “Nagy 201” offense!
Yes. Still want Watson over Trubs? No thank you, ma’am. If Nagy understood offense see wouldn’t have needed Fields.
Anytime someone puts the incompetence of Matt Nagy and the misfortune of Mitch Trubisky in the same category they lose all credibilty. We KNOW Nagy was a disater. Trubisky’s performance was pretty good given the horrendous situation and you GUESS he wouldn’t have been better with a good coach. The evidence proves you wrong. Mitch came back and put 35 on the Bears in one half and is now the starting QB for the Stealers. Maybe he wasn’t worth a #2 pick, we will never know, but he is a much better QB than he is given credit for. This… Read more »