Full Range of Expectations for Bears

Settle in. This rebuild is going to take a while.

That is the message Pro Football Focus has for Bears fans. Apparently it's not going fast enough for the people at NFL.com but then again they seem to lack a full grasp on the team's front-office situation.

The world of offseason speculation is carrying peaks and bottomless holes for the Bears.

Pro Football Focus this week came out with its early roster strength rankings and also their overall power rankings. The Bears have definitely moved up from when they were sitting at the bottom of the football world at the end of last season.

They're better but still not playoff material, says PFF.

Calling the running game the biggest Bears strength, PFF said they have the 22nd best roster even after all the offseason work GM Ryan Poles did to bolster talent. They are rated 19th overall in power ratings, which is much better than the 30th PFF had them at when last season ended.

PFF concludes, much as BearDigest has, that the weakest area on the Bears roster is the defensive line even, after they had the means to address it this offseason.

However, calling the run defense their biggest weakness still isn't saying much for Poles' work.

The line might be the weakest area, but it's weak because it provides no pass rush.

The two defensive ends they signed, DeMarcus Walker and Rasheem Green, are better at stopping the run than any defensive ends they had last year. They drafted two defensive tackles in the first three rounds and added nose tackle Andrew Billings to complement Justin Jones, the starting three technique. Billings was the 16th-ranked interior defensive line defender last year according to PFF.

Beyond that, their two linebacker acquisitions, T.J. Edwards and Tremaine Edmunds, should bolster both the run and pass defense and were such good acquisitions that the Bears linebacker corps has been ranked second best in the league by PFF.

They've done virtually nothing to improve their pass rush. PFF's own ranking for top 32 edge defenders says it all, because the Bears have no one in there and rushing the passer is the most critical aspect of an edge defender.

In defense of Dalton Wasserman and Jim Wyman, authors of the article, their comment within text summing up the overall offseason improvement says it all.

"The Bears may be the toughest team to read in the NFL," Wasserman and Wyman wrote. "The Bears could win anywhere from four to 11 games. We’ll have to see the latter happen before we believe it.

It's a realistic appraisal, at least much closer to home than an NFL.com assessment of teams feeling the heat this year. In the article by Dan Hanzus, the Bears were ranked 10th in the league for teams facing the greatest burden of expectation.

Urgency can depend on whether the expectation is from fans and media or whether it's from ownership. Of course fans and media will always want more but ownership is where pressure comes from that counts.

This assessment isn't realistic because neither Poles nor coach Matt Eberflus would likely be under real heat unless the team regresses. If you regress from 3-14, you should feel heat.

The reason why it seems unrealistic to call this an urgent situation one which seems to elude NFL.com, but shouldn't.

George McCaskey went through an elaborate process to hire both the Bears coach and GM. He initiated the process. He brought in Bill Polian to assist. With as much faith as McCaskey had in Polian and the process they used to find replacements for Matt Nagy and Ryan Pace, it's very unlikely ownership would begin applying heat to anyone if one more season of struggling ensues.

They're going to give Poles and Eberflus every opportunity to prove themselves.

It's a bit like the situation the Bears faced when the late Michael McCaskey had Dave Wannstedt as coach and defacto personnel boss. He kept Wannstedt around six years before finally throwing in the towel on his guy.

Some visible progress will be necessary and should be expected simply based on how the Vikings and Packers have dropped off within the division. This could be a year where a 9-8 or 8-9 team wins the NFC North.

In that case, maybe the possibility of the Bears going from worst to first and getting those 11 wins PFF talked about isn't entirely wishful thinking for Bears fans.

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