The pass rush was a problem for the Chicago Bears last season. Outside of Montez Sweat, nobody up front managed to take over games throughout the year. Gervon Dexter had strong spurts but could never sustain anything. Austin Booker finished the year strong, but still has areas to improve. Dayo Odeyingbo and Shemar Turner are both coming off season-ending injuries. See the state of things, you’d think the team would be a little more active in finding help. Instead, they’ve stayed silent, letting potential options disappear one after another. Now you can probably add Joey Bosa to that list.
Last week, veteran defensive end Cameron Jordan took himself off the market when he chose to re-sign with the New Orleans Saints. He admitted that 2026 is probably his last season. That left Bosa, the former Pro Bowler, as the only prominent name left available. Most assumed he was merely waiting to sign somewhere until the start of training camp. However, Adam Schefter of ESPN delivered an update that makes it seem like Bosa has no plans to return and is likely to retire.
“It is more likely than not that Joey Bosa has played his last NFL down. Now, again, could a situation like the 49ers come along that entices him enough to come out and play again? Yeah, absolutely. We saw it happen last year with Philip Rivers, so you never know when a player is fully done and when he’s not done. But the fact of the matter is, I think if the Niners wanted to pair those two together, it probably would have happened already. I think if Joey Bosa wanted to play football, it probably would have happened already.”
This decision from Joey Bosa is not all that surprising.
Over the first six seasons of his career, the defensive end was one of the elite pass rushers in the NFL, reaching four Pro Bowls. Things started going wrong in 2022. A bad core injury forced him onto Injured Reserve, where he missed all but five games of the season. Then in 2023, he missed another eight games due to multiple lower-body injuries, including hamstring and foot problems. All of this seemed to sap him of his once-great explosiveness, which in turn hurt his production.
While his season with Buffalo last year was solid, he was not the Joey Bosa everybody remembers. Couple that with the brutal way the Bills lost their playoff game against Denver, and you can understand why the 30-year-old might be done. Nothing sucks the love of football out of players faster than injuries and brutal playoff defeats. If this proves true, it leaves the market even thinner for possible pass rush options the Bears can consider if they realize what they have isn’t enough.
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They have to hope what they have is enough.
The unfortunate truth is that the Bears were in a tough spot to do anything significant this offseason. Their salary cap was already razor-thin because of several bloated contracts they handed out in 2025. That made free agency unviable. As for the draft, their late positioning in each round saw several runs on edge rushers happen before they went on the clock. Rather than take a risk reaching on talents they felt weren’t worthy of going that high, general manager Ryan Poles and head coach Ben Johnson opted to go after higher-graded talent at other positions.
None of this says they were willfully ignorant of the pass rush concerns. It was just a case of them knowing their odds of landing a difference-maker without overpaying were negligible. So they chose to improve the interior rush and fortified the secondary. It isn’t a perfect solution, but it should keep them stable. If Booker picks up where he left off last season, it may turn out all right.
