Welcome to Free Agency!
Mock drafts are a mostly useless practice, but people like them and they’re fun to do. So here is my first attempt at a 2016 mock draft. Keep a few things in mind:
• I’m not a scout. I don’t pretend to be a scout. I’ll never pretend to be a scout. But I do read a lot and listen to a lot of scouts. I have about five people whose opinions I trust more than others. I typically lean toward people who were once in the league.
• Don’t say anyone “won’t” go anywhere. Nobody knows who is going where. Even if a team directly came out and said who they were going to take, we couldn’t believe it because they lie more times than not.
• In a First Draft Podcast with Mel Kiper and Todd McShay, Adam Schefter was adamant that three quarterbacks were going in the top 10. I’ve never heard Schefty more certain of anything so I believe him.
• A lot of these are going to be wrong. Of course they are, we haven’t even hit free agency yet. Even after free agency, mock drafts are going to be wrong. But, here goes…
The benefit of the Bears bye week? I get to see more football than any other Sunday of the season. Here are a bunch of thoughts from around the league.
(1) Text from my buddy, a Bills fan, during the Yahoo! streaming of Buffalo vs. Jacksonville: “If this is the future of the NFL, they need to rethink it.” Stream was choppy and inconsistent across the country. Football on television is the perfect sports commodity. If NFL wants to adapt to a world moving beyond the traditional cable packages they’ll need to partner with existing streaming systems.
(2) Don’t want to hear the Eagles complain about dropped passes. Crap players drop passes. Philadelphia HAD good players. They got rid of them all. Now they have crap ones.
(3) Watching the NFC East & AFC South makes one thing clear: we will be having the old “should we reseed the playoffs” debate again in a few months.
(4) Shocked to see a gentlemen like Greg Hardy behave poorly on the sideline. It’s almost like he’s the type of man to throw his girlfriend on a futon stacked with guns while she cried and begged for her life. Almost.
Remember last year when David Fales hit Santonio Holmes and Holmes made a move before scoring a 32-yard touchdown? Holmes looked like an NFL wide receiver when, in reality, he was just a veteran playing with a bunch of young players. It didn’t translate, just as nothing from the fourth preseason game does. Veterans usually look good because they’re going against rookies and we can’t tell if one group of rookies stinks or if the other is good.
But here is some stuff to watch for:
Picture if you will…
January 3rd 2016.
Lions at Bears.
John Fox has rejuvenated the Bears franchise and led them to a 9-6 record. A win, at home, against the lowly Detroit Lions will send them into the postseason.
Lions lead 24-17 heading into the fourth quarter. The heavens open. Snow. Not just snow. A blizzard. Both teams struggle to move the ball. The game seems lost. With 1:07 remaining, Cutler hands the ball to Forte at midfield. A hole opens! Forte slips! Forte slides! End zone! Touchdown! Overtime!
Or not. Because now, according to the new rules of the NFL, in the howling winds off the lake, with snow piled an inch and a half high off the field, the Bears must now make a 32-yard field goal to enter the postseason.
Matt Falk at Draft Season contacted me (of all people) to partake in a blogger mock draft. And with the 7th pick in the 2015 NFL Draft, DaBearsBlog selected…
Vic Beasley LB, Clemson
Analysis: I have a phrase I use when watching college football: “jump off the screen”. These are the players that just look a step above everyone else around them. Beasely was one of these guys. In 2013. Then he made what I thought was the ludicrous decision to return to Clemson for another season. Doesn’t seem so ludicrous now as I’m taking him with the 7th pick.
Why would the Bears take him here? Why not? They need absolutely everything on the defensive side of the ball and I think when they line up Shane Ray, Randy Gregory and Vic Beasely side-by-side-by-side they will see Beasely best fits what John Fox and Vic Fangio want to do defensively.
To read the entire mock draft, CLICK HERE.
Look at the fates of the NFC’s best teams in the month of January.
In all four of these games a serious argument can be made for the losing team deserving victory. That’s how close the league has become at the top.
This space has never been used to call for the firing of a head coach and by all accounts Marc Trestman is a good and decent man whose tenacious pursuit of an NFL head coaching position deserves praise. But the Chicago Bears had two weeks to study the errs of back-to-back disasters against the Dolphins and Patriots. They had two weeks to prepare for the Green Bay Packers and set the stage for the second half of the season. What happened? They got worse. Somehow, they got less competitive.
Having spent a fair amount of this life watching NFL football I feel comfortable now making the following statement: Marc Trestman is not the right man to lead the Chicago Bears and the McCaskey family will be remiss not to make this change at year’s end.
Three final thoughts heading into tonight’s game:
Bear down.
