Jimmy Glenn was the biggest man I’ve ever known.

He wasn’t the tallest, though the average barber would need a step stool to cut his hair. He wasn’t the widest, though you could take the R train from one shoulder to the other. But framed in the bar that bore his name, Jimmy’s Corner, a comically-narrow boozer on East 44th Street in NYC, he seemed a human tower, his head brushing up against the chipped ceiling paint, his booming baritone filling the room like the ring announcers of the sport to which he devoted his life.

Jimmy Glenn was a big man, a towering vestige of a New York City that no longer exists. A gin joint owner like you saw in the movies. With personality. With heart. With compassion. He didn’t just want to know your name and what you were drinking. He wanted to know who you were, what you did, who you loved, what made you happy. He didn’t put out shitty sausage and peppers every day for free to bring in customers. He put out shitty sausage and peppers every day for free because he knew some people chose to spend the last fiver in their wallet on a pint and he wanted to make sure they ate too. I know. I was one of those people.

Jimmy’s dead now, another casualty of this fucking asshole of a virus. But there is talk that his son Adam will continue on with the bar. And god willing, he will, if only to preserve it’s walls, every inch covered with memorabilia and photographs marking Jimmy’s life in and around the ring. He got his tooth broken by Floyd Patterson as an amateur fighter. He operated a Times Square gym where Ali trained. He worked as a cut man for Cassidy and Correa. He managed and trained a million young fighters, many of them meeting with him in the tiny back storeroom while we drank and looked in, like Kay looking in on Michael Corleone at the end of The Godfather.

The Boston Globe‘s Bob Ryan, who I once shared a drink (or six) with in the joint on the night of a Joe Calzaghe fight at the Garden (I think), called it “the last honest bar in NYC”. It ain’t the last, not with Spring Lounge still around and the stairway down to Josie Woods open. But it is an honest bar. A real bar in a Times Square area overflowing with bullshit. Elmo is a knockoff. The Naked Cowboy has clothes on. It’s not that Jimmy’s Corner doesn’t belong where it is. It’s that everything else doesn’t.

I’d say I regret not going there more but fuck, man, I try. It’s hard to get a seat at Jimmy’s because there ain’t many and why would anyone want to leave the place? An Irish buddy of mine came over to New York and asked me for bar recommendations. I gave him one, Jimmy’s Corner. The next day I got a text, “If there’s a better bar in the world, I’ve never been in it.” And he’d been in quite a few.

If ever there was a better bar owner in this city, I never met him. RIP Jimmy Glenn. When this all passes, and they reopen these bars we love so much, yours will be the first I visit. And I’ll pay proper respect.

Who knows what is to come from the NFL season? But there is a schedule now and here are my thoughts.

Bears.

• Media members used to criticize the schedule release as an event with the tired mantra, “We already knew the opponents!” But the schedule release, for many fans, sets their travel agenda for the fall. And with road games in Atlanta, Charlotte, LA, Nashville and Jacksonville, you better believe Bears fans will be traversing the country if fans are allowed in these buildings this season.
• The Masters is scheduled for 11/12 – 11/15. And for some reason, I was gifted the Bears playing on Monday Night Football that week. I haven’t missed a Bears game since 2005. And I wouldn’t have missed the game that Sunday. But man, it would have been difficult to keep my eyes on a football game as the leaders made their way to the 12th tee box. (I’ll manage with the US Open at Winged Foot in September.)
• Things I love about this schedule:
  • At Lions, home Giants to start. It’s hard to predict how good teams will be but neither of these teams is gonna be any good defensively. It’s a great opportunity for the offense to get off to a decent start.
  • Week 11 bye. Teams aren’t going to need the bye early this year because there’s not going to be an intense preseason period. Having the bye in late-November should allow the Bears to rev up for the stretch run.
  • At Jaguars, home Packers to finish. Jacksonville should be one of the worst teams in the league and the Bears seemingly finish on the road every single year; usually at Minnesota. Nice to finish at Soldier.
  • The Texans coming to Chicago on 12/13. Warm weather, inside team coming to Chicago in mid-December should play in the Bears’ favor.

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Ted Ginn Jr. didn’t need to be reminded of details.

“I knew I needed to attack the safety in front of me,” Ginn said in an interview. “I knew that I had to beat him and once I saw that safety drop from the back side that would’ve taken away my angle, I knew I had green grass in front of me.”

The play was a 45-yard reception against the very team Ginn signed with last week. It was the longest play of the season for the speedy wideout and one of just seven 40-plus yard completions the Chicago Bears allowed in 2019. The play was a simple combination of talent and scheme.

“Different coverages can be created by the way you line up, a lot of different things come from different alignments,” Ginn said. “Within that play, we were in a run set type of alignment where I’m usually not in. For me it was kind of a big splash play were able to get it off.”

In his official return to the Midwest, Ginn hopes to have plenty more splash plays and he knows he signed with a coach and an offense that can offer a mutually beneficial relationship.

“(Matt Nagy) has been trying to get that type of threat in me or Tyreek Hill or DeSean Jackson, guys that we have seen prevail in this offense,” Ginn said. “I can bring my talent with (Nagy’s) knowledge and it should be a hand-in-hand type of deal. We should be able to take over.”

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Former NFL executive Joe Banner did an interview a few years ago where he referenced a study by an NFL team that found most day 3 picks who turn into successful NFL players are guys who slip through the cracks either because they were from small schools, had an injury in their last year of college, or were undersized for their position.

This made me curious, and since it was a private study without information published, I decided to do it myself.

The Setup

I used the Pro Football Reference database to grab information about every day 3 draft pick from 2007-16. I stopped at 2016 because I wanted players who had finished their 4 year rookie contracts, and started at 2007 to give me 10 seasons’ worth of data. This gave a sample size of 1509 picks.

I then identified players who were a hit based on 2 criteria:

1. They were a primary starter on offense or defense for at least 2 seasons (as defined by Pro Football Reference).
2. They had a career AV (a Pro Football Reference metric that attempts to quantify overall impact of each player) of at least 15. I chose this value as the cutoff because Nick Kwiatkoski finished his four years in Chicago with an AV of 15, and that feels about right for the cutoff for a hit.

Any player that hit at least one of these thresholds was considered a hit, while all others were not. I also found that the majority of players who hit this threshold also hit the 1st one, though there of course some outliers.

Results

Let’s take a look at some different factors and see how they influenced hit rates on day 3 of the draft.

Small School

We’ll start with players from a small school, which I defined as anything but the “power 5” conferences (ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac 12, SEC). The table below shows hit rates for Power 5 picks vs. small school picks for each round of the draft’s 3rd day.

A few thoughts:

• Generally, the small schools hit at a slightly higher rate than Power 5 schools, a difference that is more pronounced later in the draft.
• Given this, it seems weird that teams spend far more day 3 draft picks on Power 5 players than they do small school guys. Between 63%-74% of picks in each round were spent on players from Power 5 schools. Of course, fewer small school players getting drafted probably helps explain why they have a higher hit rate. If you take more small school guys just because, they probably won’t be able to sustain that higher odds of success.
• Notice rounds 4-5 are fairly similar, but very different than rounds 6-7. In order to have larger sample sizes, I will split day 3 into those 2 groups going forward.
• With that in mind, general rules of thumb to keep in mind are that roughly 1/3 of picks in rounds 4-5 pan out, compared to roughly 15% (1 in about 6.5) of picks in rounds 6-7. As we look at other factors, we’ll look for anything that changes appreciably from those numbers.

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Considering how good the defense was in 2018, believing the 2020 vintage will be better might seem like crazy talk. But the Bears have more talent (and more depth) on the unit than they did two seasons ago.

The biggest difference comes at edge where Robert Quinn has made a career out of sacking quarterbacks. Leonard Floyd made a career out of everyone wondering when he was going to start sacking quarterbacks. Floyd has his strengths and there’s a reason he ended up signing a decent contract elsewhere, but too often teams were able to get away with leaving subpar tackles on an island with a top-ten pick. The addition of Quinn makes the Bears starting third down defense basically unblockable, and he also should make it easier for Akiem Hicks to take snaps off because they’ll still be able to generate pass rush without him.

While seen as a letdown nationally, what the 2019 Bears team accomplished defensively was actually impressive, considering Hicks missed most of the season. They still finished in the top 10 in DVOA and yards allowed and top five in points allowed — just about one point per game more than they allowed in 2018. When you add in the complete failure of the offense to give them any help, the drop was not that far.

May signings are hardly ever big splashes, but the Bears ability to add Tashaun Gipson to the secondary could go down as one of the most important moves of the offseason. The Bears viewed Deon Bush and Ha Ha Clinton-Dix as similar players last year, to the point where Bush was stealing snaps from Clinton-Dix. But Gipson is a step up and a pretty sizable one at that.

While there are some injury concerns with Gipson, there’s no doubting his ability in coverage. The eight-year pro has 23 interceptions and 47 passes breakups. In Houston last year, he allowed an opponent passer rating of 55. That isn’t just better than what Bush and Clinton-Dix allowed in 2019, it’s significantly better than the 73 Adrian Amos allowed in 2018. Gipson was able to do this despite not having anywhere near the kind of supporting cast he’ll have in 2020.

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Stephanie Tracy used to come down those steps at Josie Woods, every Bears Sunday, with snacks. No, she didn’t go buy some fucking mint Milano’s at the bodega. She brought homemade cookies and cakes and brownies. Why? Because she’s one of the best dessert chefs in the world, according to Because I Said So Magazine. She’s also one of my favorite human beings on the planet.

She received her culinary degree at the Institute of Culinary Education and previously worked professionally as a pastry cook at Gramercy Tavern in New York City. The Cookie Revolution is a cookie-of-the-month club that offers unique cookie varieties every month. Information on the latest cookie offering can be found at www.cookierevolution.com or on Instagram @cookie.revolution. Anyone interested in being added to the monthly email list should send a note to cookierevolution@gmail.com.

DBB: You have a company – The Cookie Revolution – and you produce something called “The Crack Cookie”. It is the greatest cookie I’ve ever had. So who is “The Crack Cookie” when it comes to the Chicago Bears? Who is that player or coach or organization-adjacent individual you just can’t get enough of?

Steph: When I was a kid, that would have been definitely been “Refrigerator” Perry.  I know Walter Payton seems like the obvious answer (his nickname is “Sweetness” after all), but, as a 6-7 year old kid during the 1985 season, I was all about The Fridge.  I played my 45 of The Super Bowl Shuffle all the time.  We even watched he Super Bowl Shuffle video in school.  Perry was big and powerful, but also friendly and fun, and I was drawn to that.  At the time, I probably had no real understanding of what was happening in the game and The Fridge’s regular role, but I was aware of the awesomeness of his famous touchdown.  The team was exciting, and The Fridge encapsulated all of that for me.

As an adult, it is all about Devin Hester.  He was so exciting but also unpredictable.  You had no idea what he was going to do when he got his hands on the ball, and that’s why you never wanted to miss a Hester return.  His movements were so unplanned and erratic that, as a spectator, you would feel such intense anxiety watching him zigging and zagging across the field.  Then he would clear the last real defensive threat and that anxiety would turn into exhilaration.  He was so amazing and the game was so thrilling when he played!

DBB: We’ve been watching the Bears together in bars for 15 years plus. I’ve thought a lot about what it might be like if we can’t gather in bars and watch this team in the fall. Have you thought about it? What do you think the experience will be like? What would you miss?

Steph: I have definitely thought about it. 

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About three months ago, back when bars existed, I was spouting off at my local about something. Why I now love the idea of a London NFL franchise. Why Lee Trevino is underrated historically. Why Korean women dominate the LPGA but Korean men are non-existent on the men’s tour. (I think it’s about size and that’s why Sungjae Im is breaking through.) A friend of mine said, “You should have a sports radio show.”

I responded how I always respond.

“Find me the market where I can talk exclusively about football and golf and I’m in.” (I’ve narrowed these markets down to Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida and the greater Pinehurst, North Carolina metropolitan area.)

I then went into my routine refrain. I talked about Marc Silverman. Silvy of Waddle & Silvy.

Before a Long Time, There’s a First Time.

I remember when Waddle & Silvy started.

It was about two years after DBB did. I was working a desk job, as the Associate General Manager of the Helen Hayes Theatre on Broadway (a job I was TERRIBLE at), and I gave their show a shot because Tom Waddle was my favorite player growing up. To that point in my life I had only listened to one sports station (WFAN in NY) and truly only one show (Mike and the Mad Dog). But if I was going to do this blog thing seriously, I needed to know what was being discussed in Chicago. So why not listen to Waddle and this other guy?

I had never heard of Marc Silverman.

Then I heard him.

The first thing that stood out to me was the voice. It was like Malört pouring through my computer speakers. I didn’t feel like I was in Manhattan listening to a show in Chicago. I felt like I was in Chicago, sitting on my favorite bar stool at Pippin’s, listening to a guy from Skokie tell me why I was wrong about everything. The accent lent an authenticity to the opinion. It commanded attention.

The second thing, the more important thing, was the passion. And still to this day, I’m mesmerized by it. Cubs. Bulls. Blackhawks. Bears. The entire year, every season, every team. What always amazed me about Mike and the Dog was their ability to yell and scream about a decision made by the Mets manager in the fourth inning of a ballgame in May. It was obvious from that first listen that Silvy was the same. This wasn’t produced rage. It wasn’t performance. It was authentic passion. Silvy gave a shit.

And sports radio, good local sports radio, is all about giving a shit. The airwaves are littered with folks who take a third-person approach to sports, treating ballgames as comic fodder. They all think they’re Norm Macdonald. (They’re not.) They all wanna be Howard Stern. (Ain’t happening.) Those of us who truly love sports know what it means to give a shit.

Emotionally investing is hard. Emotionally investing in a public forum is even harder. It’s an art form. And Marc Silverman is a master.

That Thing He Did.

One weekday.

I have no idea what year.

I have no idea why I wasn’t at some job.

I was walking around, listening to Fiddler on the Roof, I’m sure, debating which bar stool to plop my ass down on for the afternoon.

I chose Spring Lounge. In those days, I chose Spring Lounge a lot.

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This column does not seek to project the impact these players will have long-term.

This column seems to project the impact these players will have this coming season, assuming the summer’s off-season program will be truncated or non-existent.

(7) Arlington Hambright, G

An athletic freak but a true offensive line project. The work/coaching he’d require to get on the field in 2020 simply won’t be available this summer. If he plays a snap during the regular season, something has gone terribly wrong.

But the Bears should put him on the roster. And they should sell the jerseys on the homepage of their website.

(6) Lachavious Simmons, G

Simmons gets the nod over Hambright for two reasons: (1) he’s got a bit of mauler in him and (2) his transition to guard at the next level will be easier. Again, it’s unlikely Simmons plays a down this season. But it’s more likely for him than Hambright.

(5) Trevis Gipson, Edge

The raw talent is there but Gipson’s 2020 role will almost assuredly be limited to sub-down, pass rushing situations. And with Mack and Quinn WELL ahead of him in the pecking order, the Bears would be happy if Gipson saw limited defensive snaps this season, while making his presence felt on special teams.

(4) Kindle Vildor, CB

Buster Skrine is still the starting slot corner. But it wouldn’t surprise me to see Vildor backing up that role very early on in his career. My guess is Vildor surprises many and is active on most game days.

(3) Cole Kmet, TE

There’s been a lot of talk about tight ends struggling to assimilate to the NFL. And big, physical players like Kmet are asked to do a lot more than stand up, run fast and catch passes.

Jason Witten had 35 catches his rookie season. Kyle Rudolph had 26. Kmet, especially at his position, could use a full summer slate of practices and preseason games. If he doesn’t get it, hard to think he’ll be be more than a 30-35 catch, 400 yard, 4-5 touchdown player in his rookie campaign.

But I think that’d be a brilliant sign for his future.

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Here are some random musings about the Bears’ approach to the draft last weekend.

Mortgage Paid

This draft marked the first time since 2016 that Ryan Pace didn’t trade away a future day 1 or 2 pick.

Because of these frequent trades – and the  Khalil Mack deal – the Bears have had only two 1st round picks and 5 day 2 picks (out of 8 expected) over the last 4 drafts. That kind of continued deficit catches up to you eventually, and Pace has continually borrowed from the future to make up for it.

This year, Pace finally resisted the temptation to trade a high future pick for instant gratification. This is a good thing, because you always pay a steep interest rate on those kind of moves. The typical rule of thumb is that a pick 1 year away is worth a current pick 1 round lower, which we saw in action last weekend when Pace traded a 2021 4th round pick for a 2020 5th rounder and used it to select edge rusher Trevis Gipson. At least he only traded a future day 3 pick, which while less than ideal is still better than trading away a pick from the first 2 days of the draft. Next year the Bears will have close to their full complement of picks with which to work.

Positional Focus

Prior to the draft, I identified wide receiver, offensive line, cornerback, safety, and edge rusher as the Bears’ greatest 2020 needs, with tight end as a looming roster hole for 2021 and beyond. Given that every pick this weekend was spent on these positions, and all of them besides safety were addressed, it seems they mostly agreed with me.

I also did pre-draft work looking at where value was likely to be found in the draft, and concluded:

• The best value at defensive back is early.
• Tight end and interior offensive line have better value late.
• Wide receiver has value throughout the draft.
• Edge rusher is unlikely to provide value anywhere in the draft.

Well, Pace’s approach in regards to this wisdom was mixed. They did take a defensive back early, but also late. They took a wide receiver and waited on interior offensive line, but grabbed a tight end early and took an edge rusher. Let’s compare where their selections were drafted with where they ranked on the Athletic’s consensus big board. Note Hambright and Simmons did not appear on the 300 player big board.

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