Tuesday free agency officially opens and the Chicago Bears will have the opportunity to purchase some on-field human talent. They have a dangerous combination when it comes to March in the NFL: money to spend & many roster holes. But for new GM Ryan Pace and head coach John Fox, prudence is the name of the game. (It would also be the name of the worst-selling board game in the history of Toys R Us.)

STAY AWAY FROM THE THIRTY MARK

Teams signing free agents over the age of 30 should be one or two players away from making a realistic run for a championship. The Bears are not one or two players away from making a realistic run to the grocery store. Someone mentioned to me on Twitter that he believed the 2015 Bears have a puncher’s chance to win the NFC North. They do, if the punch is landed squarely on the ACL of Aaron Rodgers.

The Bears have struggled to field two competent safeties since the partnership of Mike Brown and Tony Parrish dissolved. 2014 did not feature many standout performances in the secondary but one promising development was Ryan Mundy looking capable. Does this mean Mundy should be a starter in September? Not necessarily. But it might mean the Bears can win with Mundy on the field. And that is something I never thought I’d write.

Devin McCourty (28 when next season starts) is the crown jewel of this class. In a division with Aaron Rodgers having a safety with McCourty’s cover skills is not only an advantage but a necessity. Rahim Moore (25) is still entrenched in my mind for making one of the worst defensive plays in the history of the sport but he’s turned into a versatile safety who may have his best football ahead of him. (And John Fox would know far better than me.) Da’Norris Searcy (26) plays with the aggression of a box safety and is well-equipped to handle physical tight ends and slot receivers.

With the draft light at safety, look for the Bears to be focused on the position. And none of these men mentioned above would hit the 30 mark until (at earliest) the third year of their four-year contract.

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FOX

• John Fox was noncommittal on the future of Jay Cutler. He was asked point-blank if Cutler was his quarterback moving forward and balked. It is February 18th. We are less than a month from free agency. How many teams with a “franchise” quarterback would not endorse him as the starter today? Yes it’s possible Fox does not have enough information on Cutler to this point but what exactly is he going to learn between now and free agency or the draft? Will Cutler have an opportunity to blow Fox away at OTAs? Will the Bears be willing to risk millions of dollars on that development?
• Fox made is quite clear that if Brandon Marshall will be on the Chicago Bears in 2015 he will not be on Inside the NFL. His money quote: “Our focus needs to be on football.” This is a drastic departure from the previous head coach.
• The Bears are switching to a 3-4 base for all you 3-4/4-3 junkies out there.
• Fox knows he is taking over a defense lacking in talent. When pressed about building blocks on that side of the ball he struggled to mention anyone other than Kyle Fuller.
• Fox started to get frustrated during his short presser with the number of ways the press asked him the EXACT SAME question about Cutler. This wasn’t on the Chicago media. This was on the whole of the NFL media attending this moronic event.
• The Bears want Josh McCown back in Chicago. McCown fits to a tee the type of quarterback Fox has utilized in his first year with a team needing rejuvenation: limited ability but  great leadership qualities. If the Bears are targeting a quarterback in this draft (or a young player at the bottom of somebody else’s roster), McCown is a far better choice to help groom that young talent than Cutler.
• Seemed to be little desire on Fox’s part to leave door open for Lance Briggs and Charles Tillman to return.

The takeaway…

On offense, Fox has to determine whether his supremely talented quarterback and receiver fit in with the locker room he’s trying to build. On defense, Fox has to find players. He doesn’t have many now.

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There was a popular refrain sung on social media about midway through the 2014 season, denigrating General Manager of Christmas Past Phil Emery for building a fantasy team on offense. The connotation of this accusation seemed to be that the Bears offense was a collection of talented individuals who somehow did not work as a unit. The string quartet brought together two brilliant violins, a heartbreaking cellist and virtuoso violist but their  performance lacked cohesion.

Now, unless fantasy football has changed drastically since I last played (Marshall Faulk won me a fantasy title in my last year involved), the object of the game is production. Productive players equal fantasy points equal victories equal a nice pile of cash men can hide from their wives to use at strip clubs with oddly vague names like Sensations.

Only Chicago Bears fans, who’ve had maybe six great skill players in the organization’s history, could wage the complaint “We’ve got too many productive players on offense!”

Phil Emery made mistakes as Bears GM, most notably hiring the worst head coach in team history.

But Emery deserves nothing but praise for this assemblage of offensive talent. The Bears, the damn Chicago Bears, have two top receivers, a top tight end and two top guards. (Yes, Matt Slauson is a top guard. His absence was THE major factor in the offensive line’s decline in 2015.) The team also has one of the league’s finest backs and a productive quarterback. 2013’s offensive production was not an aberration or anomaly. It was the proper output from one of the league’s most talented units.

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DBB Coins a New Term

From Twitter, yesterday:

Many like to use the phrase “meatball” to describe a certain kind of fan. In Chicago I am going to refer to those people as “Score-ons”.

It is on all of us to make this phrase happen.

BIGGS, BEARS, BAD JOB?

Because I tend not to forget and choose to hold others accountable, from the opening of a New Year’s Eve piece in the Tribune by Brad Biggs:

In announcing the massive housecleaning Monday at Halas Hall, President Ted Phillips called the Bears’ head coaching job prestigious.

He stands nearly alone in that opinion in light of a Tribune poll of NFL front-office employees and coaches who ranked the Bears barely above the Raiders in terms of attractiveness.

Quarterback concerns left the Jets at the bottom, but the Bears job wasn’t considered much better even with Jay Cutler, the passer in whom they have invested so much money and whom Chairman George McCaskey said he is a fan of personally and professionally. Elsewhere, Cutler is classified as a coach killer.

The Bears landed an in-demand (young) GM, a head coach who has been to two Super Bowls, the best defensive coach on the market and an offensive coordinator who interviewed for just about every head coaching vacancy. Rumors have it that if the Bears job were prestigious, Vince Lombardi would have climbed out of his grave and agreed to a five-year, $35 million contract.

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Vic Fangio is one of the best defensive coaches in the league. His performance in 2014, in the wake of an injury flood at key positions, was just as impressive as anything Todd Bowles did in Arizona. Now he is the Bears defensive coordinator and the Bears have arguably the best defensive room in the league.

Photo appeared in the Chicago Tribune.

The press conference set to begin at 11 AM CT to introduce John Fox as the 15th head coach in the history of the Chicago Bears. You can watch the press conference live on NFL Network or at ChicagoBears.com and listen live at ESPN 1000 (we don’t promote the other station round these parts).

Remember as you’re enjoying the press conference, these were jobs nobody wanted according to your local media. And they were filled by a young GM in-demand and a head coach with two Super Bowl appearances. You will hear today what I’ve written all along, “head coach of the Chicago Bears” means a great deal to those men who fill the NFL’s coaching ranks.

The best I’ve ever been taught the three-act structure of playwriting was by a a wonderful writer and teacher named Pat Cook at the BMI Musical Theatre Writing Workshop. Cook, recalling the lessons of a teacher from his own past, described it thus:

Act One: get the main character up a tree.

Act Two: throw rocks at him.

Act Three: if he comes down safely, comedy. If he falls to his death, tragedy.

At the risk of harping on an issue many readers of this site could care less about, this structure is being more or less abandoned by the modern dramatic writer. The three-act play is being replaced by the 65-minute “meditation” on a relevant theme. (How hard it is to be gay, violence in schools, sex scandals in politics!) Plays with beginnings, middles and ends – once referred to as “well-made plays” – are now considered old-fashioned.

John Fox is not the hot coordinator of the moment, the NFL’s equivalent of a meditation on a relevant theme. What has Adam Gase actually done? How much does Dan Quinn actually provide the ridiculously-talented Seahawks defense? Shhh! Who cares? These are the names of the moment and they excite owners and fans in the same manner any shiny toy in the window excites a child: they’re new!

Fox is not new. He is a veteran head coach, an established structure, an old-fashioned play. The Chicago Bears are his third act.

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John Fox is not a flawless head coach. But the Chicago Bears are coming off a 2014 debacle defined by locker room meltdowns, traitorous coach leaks, endless primetime blowouts and a lack of any and all competitive fight. The organization, more than savvy play-calling or altered scheme, was desperate for stability. Fox is thirty games over .500 as a head coach. He is well-respected across the NFL landscape. He will build a top tier, professional staff. (Including the most exciting candy in the pinata, Kyle Shanahan.)

Stability has arrived.

Perhaps most importantly, John Fox will lead the locker room. There will be no more questions of accountability or articles written about the head coach addressing his players from the back of the room. The Chicago Bears will blow their horns to the tempo of Fox’s baton. And whilst hiring him does not guarantee topping Aaron Rodgers in the NFC North, it does guarantee the Bears return to respectability.

So welcome, Coach Fox, to a proud franchise. Welcome to a fan base desperate for the kind of toughness that came to define your teams throughout tenures in Carolina and Denver. Welcome to a city that rewards its champions with a lifetime of applause – muted in winter through thick, wool mittens – and more endorsement money than your pockets can hold.  (Not to mention radios shows, restaurants…etc.)

Welcome. Now win.

I have nothing more to add. The Chicago Bears are in a holding pattern until they make a decision, one way or the other, on John Fox.