Yep. Fully cleaning house from top to bottom (including Poles) seems to be inevitable at this point.
+1 And the buzz-kill downer for me is to think what this means. It means starting over. Again. And assuming (probably not good to assume here) the Bears actually CAN hire the right GM/coaching staff this time around - it will realistically take until ~2026 to have the roster where it really needs to be. We have zero true All Pro players on this team. Right now we don't even have a 2022 alternate Pro Bowl guy. D.J. Moore is probably our best player and he has NEVER been All Pro or even a Pro Bowl guy.
We got nothing right now. Where are the difference-makers? Where are the game-changer guys on this Bears roster now? We got zilch. Nothing. We keep hoping we get lucky with a 5th round Mooney, or a 5th round Brax Jones... or that some FA works magic here, LOL like Yannick Ngakoue - the guy no other team in the NFL wanted to sign.
Legit top-tier QBs, WRs, DL & OL guys, TE's, etc, are pretty much 1st round draft picks (and 50% of those 1st round picks typically bust too). Can you "get lucky" and draft a great mid round guy or late round guy? Sure. But let's be real here. It's difficult enough just to get a 1st round pick right... the stats show diminishing returns after the first round. We get all enthused when a 5th round guy like Mooney is drafted, but he is NOTHING elite-level. Braxton Jones another late round guy is a "hope and a prayer" guy... this is how the Bears roll. And our roster talent is so rotten bad that these late round "good but not great guys" seem like Jerry Rice or Anthony Munoz. But they are JAGs at best. You want first round talents? Then your best chance of landing one is to invest 1st round picks to acquire them. We probably need 4 to 6 first round picks to hit, to get legit top-tier QBs, WRs, DL & OL, TE guys. And that's assuming our other picks (2-7) are solid for the most part too.
And people will chime in and say "team X" did it with crap players, so why can't the Bears. But I don't see Super Bowl championship teams with crap players. So I don't buy into that "hope and a prayer" build greatness overnight thing. Bears gotta long ways to go now, once they do the big re-set again with new GM and coaching staff. Nothing to see here. We've seen this movie before and know how it ends. It never ends well for us...
You can take a team like the Eagles as a model. They didn’t do it all “through the draft.” Look at their Pro Bowl players from 2022. Some were drafted. Some were FA. Some were acquired by trade (AJ Brown). A competent GM acquires star players from all THREE sources. You can take 49ers as another example, or even the Lions. Now, consider what Poles has brought in from all three sources and it’s obvious why we have fallen behind other teams that were also on “rebuild “ mode in 2022 (LIONS, Seahawks, Jags). No doubt poor coaching has added fuel to the fire, but you are 100% correct that the overriding fundamental problem is simply a dearth of talent on this team.
You are also correct that it’s now up to Kevin Warren to clean house and start over. The sooner the better IMO.
