The flipside to that is that the playoff field is unusually strong overall. Unless Miami gets the 7 in AFC, there are no truly mediocre teams in the field. Contrast to 2020 when the Bears were an absolutely awful 7 seed.
And they completely wasted 2 number 1 overall draft picks to draft a guy to replace another guy who wasn’t actually the problem.
Watch fields in Pittsburgh next year be good. He was good before Russell came back this year too.
Fields was the only viable QB who could succeed with an O-line as terrible as the Bears. Williams had potential, but not as a guy who could escape a pass rush in 1 sec. Knowing the Bears would draft him was knowing the season would fail.
Will they finally draft OL in the first round, or will they ...checks notes ...be the Bears? I feel like they'd sooner pick a TE like Loveland—despite Fanning Jr being a better blocker—and think that solves the line.
I'm still imagining my preferred timeline of keeping Fields, trading down the 1st for JC Latham, and stockpiling picks. Caleb Williams had the worst follow-up year of any Heisman winner.
Caleb's Heisman campaign was one of the easiest defensive schedules ever in modern CFB. PAC12's 2022 defenses were historically the worst of any P5 conference in any post-BCS year. The AAC had better defenses (As Tulane would show, also beating USC that year)
Did anyone in the Bears organization realize that replacing one of the most mobile QBs in NFL history with essentially a statue who had never faced even 1/8th of an NFL pass rush would result in disaster? O-Line was always the greatest need.
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Watch fields in Pittsburgh next year be good. He was good before Russell came back this year too.