While carefully avoiding idiotic, grinning skull Pompei in today’s Chicago Tribune I read David Haugh’s article called “Emery’s Priority is Clear” because it had the tag line that I wanted to see
Bears GM has shot to fortify O-Line
Now we are talking. No more BS. Let’s get to the heart of the matter and give Mike Tice something to actually work with instead of busted draft choices (Carimi excepted, hopefully) and scrap parts.
Haugh starts by chuckling at the ineptitude of Angelo and our botched first round trade last year. It isn’t hard to get above that very, very low bar (the trade part, that is, the pick hopefully goes OK).
Here is the quote that Haugh uses from Urlacher:
Phil Emery knows what he is doing, obviously
Well that’s a start. No one here at “Fire Everybody” has had much faith in management of the Bears for many, many years although we do need to give them a shout-out for opening their dusty, cob-webbed pocketbook of grandma McCasket and springing for Cutty and Peps.
We are so used to the face of the franchise furrowing his brow at front-office moves.
Hey Urlacher’s not the only one. We’ve been furrowing our brow (and screaming unprintable things) from the cheap seats forever, for no gain.
Here is what Haugh has to say about the players that the Bears have picked up in the off-season so far.
When you have carried bad offenses as long as Briggs and Urlacher have, signing a legitimate #1 wide receiver indeed feels like the Bears equivalent of laying on hands… they know newly signed backups at running back, Michael Bush, and quarterback, Jason Campbell, possess enough talent to start on some teams. They know why Devin Thomas and Eric Weems and Blake Costanzo earned reputations as special teams stalwarts. They know strong side linebacker Geno Hayes and guard Chilo Rachal and cornerbacks Kelvin Hayden and Jonathan Wilhite represent low risk, high reward gambles for a team that lacked quality depth.
I certainly hope that these guys (the supposedly low-risk high upside picks) do better than the retreads we picked up last year that were all busts, guys like Hurd with his garbage bag of dope and the new Ronnie Harmon.
Then Haugh shows why he isn’t an idiot like Pompei. He says go with the O-Line on the first pick.
The weakest position remains offensive line – which is why I would use the Bears’ first-round pick to select athletic left tackle Jonathan Martin out of Stanford.
I am not an expert to know which offensive linemen are the best this far down in the draft but the sentiment I agree with 100%. Unless we are going to pay a zillion dollars on the free agent market (and quality left tackles simply aren’t available at any price usually, anyways) we have to start with what is available or we will never get better. It was only an act of total ineptitude that ever got Cutty over to the Bears in the first place on the part of the Broncos and we can’t count on that sort of stupidity again.
So I guess that I am getting pretty optimistic about the whole thing. I do think that most of these off season moves seem to make sense. Bye bye insane coordinator Martz. And they kept Toub (don’t know how) and Tice won’t make the place worse, by the low, low standards of prior Bears offensive coordinators (either just terrible or insane).
Let’s pick an O Lineman and get this draft started!