The steps to rebuild your NFL team through the draft

Honest; I aggree w/most of this, but the reality is that you have to draft well w/or w/out the vision; and there is no consistent winning w/out a qb; so 3 and 4 can be merged. 

That Lovie team run was really built before he got here. Tillman, Briggs, Urlacher, Brown were all year before he was hired, that was what his success was built on. Just get good players in the draft and get a coaching staff competent enough to use them.


Talent doesn't need "coached up", it needs to be merely put in a position to win via good scheme's. Jordan Howard wasn't coached up last year; he just needed an OL strong enough to open up some holes for him.  No one is convincing me that the coaches "coached up" Howard.

So.  They're saying:

Great GM and Coaches + Great Drafts + Great Players + Great QB = Great Team

Who knew?

This will revolutionize the entire sport.  The quote that had the greatest impact was the step-3 point, "Draft with a vision, and Coach players up"... I mean, now all teams have to do is follow that rule and start filling the trophy case with Lombardi's.  We need to send this to Halas Hall.  Just draft well and coach well - and shazzamm, the Bears will dominate the NFL for years now.

That road map has been clear enough to navigate by for decades but somehow the Bears always take a left turn just before the exit marked success.  Let's examine the steps in contrast to reality.

Step 1: Are Pace and Fox actually working in congress on a shared vision?  Certain things would tell me no and that's it been more of a compromise on Pace's part as he's tried to get players Fox doesn't feel fit gone and replace them.  Has that worked?  I'd say no or at least not yet.

Step 2: Nice thought but then you have to have talent you can trade for extra picks.  We haven't and still don't have players who can attract top picks in trade so our return on the top offensive talent we parted with brought us very little.  But then draft picks are a much more valuable commodity now then they were when Jimmy Johnson made that trade so the haul wouldn't even be close even if we had players like a Herschel Walker.

Step 3:  I believe Pace has drafted with a vision for who and what was needed but injuries have stalled the progress and therefore the evaluations of a few key picks.  To that we can probably add some questionable picks who have done little or nothing so far to justify taking them.  I relate this at least to some degree to the problems getting Step 1 ironed out.  I don't believe it has been or at least not so far.

Step 4: Well we did have a QB we could win with had the rest of this formula ever been accomplished first but that was never the case.  So we start all over again with a lesser QB still not having put all of the pieces in place for him to succeed.  As badly as we need a top talent at QB IMHO this would not be the year to spend heavily on one.  Fix the rest, especially the OL and the defense, and the coaching issues as well, then get your QB.  A good QB can win most of the time playing behind a great defense.  Mac was proof of that and whether some choose to believe it or not so was Cutler.  He won well over 80% of his starts when the opponent scored 20 points or less.

This isn't a hard road map to follow but for over 30 years the Bears have been unable to do it.  Why?  To me all signs point towards the only people who've been around for all 30 plus years and that would be the McCaskey's.  We've been through about 5 different HCs since Ditka was fired, we're on our 4th or 5th GM/Personnel Chief, and thousands of players and yet they have failed to grasp how to execute those four steps and create a winning organization.  There are no alternative facts or excuses that work here.  Only this reality.  So I'll just say it again.  Until the McCaskey's and Ted Phillips stop showing up at Halas Hall at all and hire a top guy to run their team I fear history will keep repeating itself ad infinitum.