Worse Bears Move: Moving Up for Mitch or Jay's Big Contract?
When it comes to mistakes, Bears GM Ryan Pace obviously committed a whopper by trading up to draft Mitchell Trubisky and not drafting Patrick Mahomes or Deshaun Watson.
Was it the biggest Bears mistake of the past decade?
No doubt it was a total foul-up. It's trendy to blast Pace now. However, many teams would have passed on Mahomes and did.
You have to remember Mahomes was coming into the league out of what many considered a gimmicky college offense. It's one of the main reasons he didn't get selected until the 10th pick.
Who knows if he would have fallen even more if Andy Reid hadn't traded up to get him?
Things have since changed and many NFL teams have incorporated parts—if not all—of that gimmicky offense into their own attack. They just don't have a passer as brilliant as Mahomes to run it.
Saying someone should have drafted Mahomes is so much second-guessing. Hindsight always was, and still remains, 20-20.
Plenty of teams between the second pick and 10th could have used Mahomes and didn't take him. Why didn't Houston take him instead of taking Watson?
Not drafting Watson was the real mistake Pace can be tagged with because he was obviously from a large, winning program, led a national championship team and has so much depth of character and leadership skills based on his home life.
Giving up the draft picks was a major foul up as well, although the cynical out there would ask what Pace was going to do with those draft picks other than waste them anyway?
All combined, none of this equals the single biggest mistake of the last decade by the Bears and it was general manager Phil Emery who made it.
In January of 2014, he decided he needed Jay Cutler bad enough to give him a seven-year, $126 million deal with $54 million guaranteed.
The $126 million might sound like chicken scratch now with Mahomes getting $500 million, but at that point it was definitely near the top of the pay scale.
They already knew this was the quarterback they were getting:
- One who had already left the NFC championship game with an injury many thought was minor enough to play with.
- One who had already played five seasons in Chicago and showed no sign of being able to elevate a team. Remember, the 2010-12 Bears were still solidly a defensive-oriented team and Cutler was supposed to be the piece to put them over the top. He couldn't lift them over anything. They made a Super Bowl with many of those defensive players and Rex Grossman was the quarterback.
- One who could not beat Green Bay with any level of consistency despite having one of the league's best defenses backing him for five straight years.
- One who couldn't outplay journeyman Josh McCown. Remember, McCown had just come in and replaced Cutler during the 2013 season for five games and using the same offense he posted a 109 passer rating with only one interception and an outstanding 8.2 yards per attempt. Right there Emery should have looked at what happened and said he'd rather give a little of the money to McCown and use the rest to rebuild a defense that had already aged out, as well as get some receivers who didn't have Brandon Marshall's mouth.
Instead, Emery committed what was a huge chunk of their salary cap space to Cutler for the next three seasons and then couldn't afford to bring in free agent help to rebuild the defense or supply proper receiver or offensive line help.
And remember, Emery already knew what he had there in Cutler. It wasn't a guessing game like the draft. He still wanted that contract signed.
It was like looking at your neighbor's broken-down old car and buying it off him for an outlandish price. You've seen it's going nowhere and you buy it anyway and pay all your available cash for it.
The end result was it got Emery fired after the 2014 season, as well as the coach who also was behind doing this, Marc Trestman.
And that led directly to Ryan Pace, which then led to Mitchell Trubisky.
Without the Cutler fiasco you might even say the Bears do not have Pace as a GM and don't have Trubisky. Perhaps they would have drafted someone else in 2015 or 2016.
There is always an element of risk involved in the draft. It's a crap shoot, a journey into the unknown.
The Mahomes pick would have been very intuitive considering how far back he went in the draft, and he still would have had to develop in Chicago under John Fox and Dowell Loggains.
Watson was an obvious pick.
However, the Cutler contract signing had no element of the unknown involved. Emery knew what he was getting and proceeded face first right into it with glee. It was almost like he hadn't even watched any of the previous five years of games.
There's no sense lamenting the Mahomes and Watson situation now, especially when they've already had one even dumber move made by Pace's predecessor.
Twitter: BearDigest@BearsOnMaven
