The Chapel Hill Story
An excerpt from Dan Wiederer’s magnificent piece in the Trib:
As Pace does with all such get-to-know-you dinners, he asked Trubisky to pick the restaurant and make the reservation. It’s a minor request. But it often can be revealing of a player’s reliability.
Pace also ordered Trubisky to keep the meeting top secret, so as not to tip off anyone — not any Tar Heels coaches or teammates, not any other NFL execs or agents, not even a campus meter maid — to the Bears’ interest.
Trubisky took the directive and pieced things together.
Before Pace and his cohorts arrived on campus, the Bears GM had a text. Dinner at 7 p.m.
The venue: Bin 54, a top steakhouse in North Carolina’s Triangle region. And to keep the gathering covert, Trubisky made the reservation for six under an alias: James McMahon.
“I thought that was cool,” Pace says.
Read the entire article. It is the best work Dan has done since coming to Chicago.
Kyle Long on the Move?
Brad Biggs was first to report the Bears intend to shift Kyle Long from right to left guard, as one of the team’s few offensive stars rebounds from injuries. The positional move leaves little to be discussed. Right guard, left guard, who really gives a shit? But it was one paragraph in the piece that stood out to me:
The complicating factor is that Long is still rehabilitating from the grisly right ankle injury he suffered Nov. 13 in a loss to the Buccaneers. So it’s not like he’s expected to be on the field when the Bears line up for the beginning of organized team activities Monday at Halas Hall. The hope is Long will be in action before the start of the season, but when he’ll be ready to practice remains to be seen and general manager Ryan Pace and coach John Fox have been extra evasive in discussing timelines for any of the injured veterans.
When I see a sentence that involves the word “hope” paired with the phrase “start of the season”…my antenna goes up. The same sentiments were being expressed a year ago when it came to Kyle Fuller. It’ll be impossible to form an accurate prognosis on Long until early August but it’s not looking positive in late May. (Sidenote: Long is the team’s toughest SOB. He’ll be out there.)
Quick Hits
- Adam Hoge argues that success in 2017 could be defined not by Trubisky development but by White and Floyd’s impact.
- The great Rick Gosselin makes the argument for Jimbo Covert’s induction into the Hall of Fame.
- Hoge & Jahns – doing by far the best Bears podcast in the marketplace – sat down with Peter King to discuss his experiences inside the Niners war room during the draft.
