Bears Haven't Given Up on Idea of Practicing with Broncos
The Bears are still hoping to visit for a while with their former defensive coordinator Vic Fangio this summer despite the pandemic.
The Bears are slated to play Fangio's Denver Broncos in a Saturday, Aug. 22 preseason game, the second exhibition. Pace said during an interview with Pro Football Talk's Mike Florio that they have been hoping to go to Denver earlier in the week and conduct scrimmages and practice with the Broncos as they did once when John Fox was head coach, but the pandemic has prevented team headquarters across the league from opening for a least a few weeks and minicamps in late June are now in jeopardy.
"We're hopeful that we can have combined practices with the Denver Broncos," Pace said. "I don't know if that's going to happen. We have our fingers crossed on that."
Pace sounded a little like Virginia McCaskey when talking about the team's state of mind heading toward the summer.
After the firing general manager Phil Emery and coach Marc Trestman, Bears chairman of the board George McCaskey said of his mother, the daughter of George Halas, "She's pissed."
"The one hard part about not all being together right now is I think our team is in a good state of mind," Pace said. "I think everybody's a little bit pissed off.
"Everybody has a chip on their shoulder and I would love to be carrying that momentum through the OTAs and through the minicamps. Unfortunately, we don't have that and we're going to have to pick that up in training camp when that starts because I do feel like our team is in the right mindset right now."
Pace said the team should not have been at .500
"So you go through last year and it just eats at you and we all have a bad taste in our mouth; 8-8 definitely isn't good enough," he said. "We didn't fulfill our expectations.
"So now it's about everybody don't be defensive, everybody drop their egos, we're all humbled. What can we do better to get this thing back on the track that it was on in '18? And I think we've done a lot of things this offseason to get that going because last year was unacceptable."
Florio wanted Pace to commit to a date for determining a winner in the quarterback derby between Mitchell Trubisky and Nick Foles.
"We haven't said: 'This is going to be the timetable,' " Pace told Florio. "We've just said it's going to be a daily evaluation for us.
"Obviously there's a little bit of an acceleration to it. Matt and I have already talked about playing our players more in the preseason this year. We hadn't done that as much the past two years. That's going to be important to get the starters out there.
"I know quarterback is the focus, but there are other (competitions for positions) as well."
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