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I think Buckner makes the best sense. I don't see Mack providing much more pressure than what we have. Buckner yes, and he's very tall in the middle, causing sight issues and potential batted balls. Next year, we should draft extremely heavy on D. Getting rid of Sweat, Dayo, Grady and Jaylon will open 65 million in cap space.(Not sure how the dead money would work and really don't care) I'd mentioned trading Rome earlier last week, but with Cole going down it changes my thoughts...

Yeah with him on IR and in the last year of his contract, there would be little benefit to an acquiring team.

Braxton is the most logical trade IMO. We don’t need 3 LTs. The IR issue doesn’t help. I think he’s only earning 5m so perhaps frees up 2m.

Crazy how just a few years ago we would be looking at the Tankathon rankings to see how high a pick the Bears would get, and now it's their playoff odds. Through Week 7, the Bears have a 71% chance to make the playoffs, the 3rd highest in the NFC, only behind MIN and SF as the 5th Seed (best non-Division winner). They would play CAR if the season ended today. The 8th Seed right now is SEA. GB is the 7th Seed. The Bears just have to beat out one of them to make the playoffs, preferably both. GB owns the tie breaker right now. So the MNF game against SEA is huge.

I would take either of those guys. Buckner has 4.0 sacks, Mack has 3.0 (in one fewer game). Mack also just had a bye, so he will have some fresher legs, especially with another bye for the Bears coming up. Cap hit is going to be the biggest factor. From my own math, Mack would cost $4.89M to the acquiring team. Buckner would cost $7.94M. So both could be had under the Bears current cap. Since they would be taking a spot within the top 51 salaries, they would bump Loving off, reducing the new cap hit to the salary cap by 891K. The Bears have approximately $9.2M available, so Mack would cost about $4M to that number, leaving just over $5M on the cap. Buckner would cost $7.1M, leaving just over $2M on the cap. I don't know what performance bonuses are out there, and those have to be taken into consideration. So my assumption is Mack is way more realistic than Buckner unless the Bears are able to move a player on their top 51 who has cap savings if traded post-June-1. A Jaylon trade would be amazing. Save $15.5M on the cap, get Buckner and Mack AND save $4M in cap space.

In all fairness, I don't think KC was nearly as good as their record was coming into that game. Their last 4 games were against the Chargers, Raiders, Dolphins, and Colts. All terrible in their own way. Mahomes is a shell of his former self; Kelce is a HoFer, but past his prime, and once they committed to stopping the run, Walker had nowhere to go. SEA's entire offense is JSN. SEA has 4x 3pt wins. This was their first by more than a TD.

I watched Seattle and KC tonight. Their run defense is very good but they gave plenty of opportunities for open receivers. Mahomes just looked really bad and missed quite a few open receivers. When they did catch the ball it was often low or behind them. We will need to be better. Darnold is still the same and gets nervous under pressure. He will make bad throws. Jaxson is insane and can’t be stopped. Their Australian punter is better than ours.

There’s a lot of noise that Poles is making calls. It does appear we’re going to do something before the deadline. Most of the rumors are centered on Mack returning. There is also a fair amount of smoke around DeForest Buckner.

As an aside, Atlanta knocked off formerly unbeaten SF. As a reminder the Bears beat ATL at home a few weeks ago at their home. I’m not as concerned of SF as I once was. Let’s go Lions!

All based on the assumption the past predicts the future. It doesn’t fit an ascending player.

Also, a weird split. The Bears are 0-4 when Caleb passes for 320 or more yards, are 12-3 when he passes from between 220-320, and 7-12 when he passes for fewer than 220. So 220 is the magic number for him, and it seems that once you get too high (over 320) that they are trailing or in a shootout.

It's pretty insane. Last year thru 7 games, the average TOP was 29:34 with only two games over 30 mins out of 7. This year, the average TOP is 35:30 with 2 games over 40 mins, 6 over 30, and the lowest game of 29:36. So there is essentially a 6-minute gain in TOP from last year. The Bears current TOP is the highest I could find dating back to 2000. No other team was over 35 mins, and only 3 teams were over 34, the 2018 Ravens, 2001 Steelers, and 2000 Titans.

What is the TOP and total offensive plays difference? I think that is huge...

Thru 7 games, the Bears are a game ahead of last year's pace at 5-2. They lost to BAL to fall to 4-3 last year before rattling off 5 straight and 7 of 8. The offense is averaging 1.7 extra pts per game, 3.4 extra first downs, 40 more yards on offense with +0.7 extra turnovers per game. The only flaw being the extra turnovers. Honestly, I am surprised how close the numbers are. They would probably be a little better if Caleb didn't miss time, but it feels like the Bears offense has a floor, and 24 pts a game is the new 17 (in the Fields era). The defense is pretty shocking. They are allowing 6 fewer pts, 4.9 first downs, 37 fewer yards, and are averaging 0.86 fewer takeaways per game. The run defense is the biggest change from last year for either unit, averaging 55.7 fewer yards per game. The reason for the change is that the Bears are playing with the lead this year. They had 180 pass attempts with the lead for the entire year in 2025. They already have 121 thru 7 games.

Only if they are up by 30, then get cute and have fun.

I never want to see that play, inside the ten, again.

At a minimum it is on film so now it changes what DTs and LBs (since I believe OG is their first read) think about if they see Thuney or Jackson start to pull right there near the goal line. Ultimately it was a LB who saw it and tackled Thuney. So if you’re at the goal line and you can get them to hesitate just bit that might be enough to squeeze someone in for a TD.

Season Projections thru 7 games: Passing Williams 308-434, 71.0%, 3,570 YDS, 8.2 Y/A, 18 TD, 4 INT, 42 Sacks Rushing Swift 282-1,156-17 (Career Best 1,087) Monangai 210-1,134-11 (Career Best 783) Williams 84-448-7 (Career Best 489) Receiving Burden 85-1,192-5 (Career Best 652) Odunze 58-925-0 (Career Best 734) Loveland 63-592-5 (Career Best 713) Raymond 63-592-3 (Career Best 616) Swift 53-369-0 (Career Best 452) To get to 4K Passing, Caleb needs to average 298 a game for the last 10 games. Swift is about to have a record year for himself, on pace for ove 1,500 total yards and 17 TDs. I always thought of him a 3rd Down outside the numbers type of runner, at least when he was in Detroit. He has completely changed his game since coming to the Bears. He is 3rd in the NFC in rushing, only behind Bijan and Gibbs. If Monangai misses additional time, obviously his projection will drop, but right now the Bears have 2x 1,100 Rushers. That has only happened one other time, the 2009 Panthers with Stewart and Williams (16g season). Burden is a problem for the opponents. He is 9th in receptions, 8th in yards, but 18th in targets. He has the highest (YACOE) YAC over expected for WRs. He is already a top 10 WR in the NFL with the fewest targets of the bunch. If he gets more targets he will be in the top 5 easily. Odunze is settling in as a solid WR2, like Tee Higgins. Would be nice to see him come down with a few more balls and hit 1K. If Caleb is going to get to 4K, Odunze gets to 1K. There will be around 20 Receivers (WR+TE) with over 1K Receiving Yards this year. Would be crazy to have 2x 1K RBs and 2x 1K WRs in the same season. That has never happened before. Loveland started last season slow, with 11-116 yards thru his first 6 games, then exploded down the stretch, so I expect his number to go way up from the current projection. Especially with Kmet out for the year. Loveland will see more snaps.

I found this article on Heavy. A good read. Ben Johnson Trick Play: The Fridge Would Have Understood I'm not a big fan of the site; too much speculation on trades, but they do, on occasion, have an interesting article on a hot topic about the Bears.

Yes, and if Caleb would get his head in front of Thuney and hand off behind, that would be legal. It's hard to disguise that way, thus the rule. It would take a little more time and would require some slight of hand.

I’m almost certain we'll see this again down the road. And probably just like described. Wouldn’t be the least bit surprised it was Thuney. Imagine if he’d score and how cool for him that would be? Four SB wins but never a TD score until then? Pretty awesome salute to him if they could pull it off. I noticed a few times in the game they were doing that thing where they swap sides on the oline. One time I caught it live was Benedet and Wright and think it was on a significant gain on offense.

So he couldn't declare because he is a Guard, and only the ends can declare, at least thats how I interpreted the rule. If he declared, and was at RT, he could've received the handoff that way. Not declaring, and at OG, he could only receive the ball lateral or behind. Which brings up an interesting wrinkle, they could pull a OG behind the QB and the QB could hand it to him legally.

i think the salary cap implications would be for next year, and we should have over $100 Million in space. Caleb will get some, but we will redo the defense too?

First off: The Patriots did go to the Superbowl last year so they are not a bad team. The Patriots blitzed Caleb on 60% of the pass plays and he put up 300+ yds and 30pts against it. We don’t hit the quick short slants because our Oline is good and was picking up the blitz giving guys like Burden time to get 15 yards downfield and exploit the wide open gaps in coverage. If Caleb can pull it off, I’ll take the chunk plays against a blitz over the 5 yd slants all day. We were doing that all game long. We don’t have Monangai and Swift is fighting through some injuries so the passing game had to carry the day unlike how we handled the Eagles with running game sprinkled in with some passes by Keenum. Roschon is just pedestrian. Enter Caleb. IMO the difference between our offense and the Patriots, and between the QBs as well, couldn’t be more clear and I really like what I saw from the Bears and Caleb. Early on Maye couldn’t figure out our coverage and pressure packages. Then they shifted to a lateral offense with simple WR screens and other simple short-game stuff. Later they started running all WRs deep to take the coverage shell with them and dumping off to an outlet (TE or RB) who was initially held in blocking. It worked well because we have no elite pass rush threats on the Dline. It was also incredibly easy to read stuff for Maye. But we did adapt to that on defense and late in the game you saw one of our defenders peel off with the TE or RB. That also confused or bothered Maye a bit because he started becoming more erratic with his passes. Meanwhile through out the entire game Caleb was just slinging it all over the field against their pressure and coverages. He also had WRs with several big drops in the game : Raymond, Loveland 2x, Rome that would have moved his comp% from 66% to 78%. Casual stats reviewers will look at the overall numbers and say Maye and Caleb played about the same. But they didn’t. Maye picked up about 100 yards passing in garbage time against prevent defense. At least 50 was on the play before the half the rest came late when we were making sure they got no TDs over the top which worked because we forced them into burning clock and taking a FG, giving us the onside kick. Whereas Caleb never had the opportunity to throw against that. Years ago I used to look at Trubisky’s or Fields’ stats after games like that where we were trying to come from behind late and the other team was giving us easy underneath stuff. They’d end up with 250-300yds but it was just lipstick on a pig. Think about what type of offense you will need to succeed in the playoffs. Our defense is good, not bad, but it’s not great. Smart coaches will find a way to get some plays in. I can’t see where the strategy for what Maye did against us being successful against a really good playoff defense. I can definitely see where the stuff Caleb was doing translates very well. It’s also why heads around the league and media are turning in our direction. We’re 5-2 and we got there with 3 different QBs. Our defense is playing well enough to keep most teams around 20-25pts. That won’t be enough against Caleb and Ben. p.s. The D needs a couple players to be more consistent. I don’t think we’ll be able to find a DT and CB, or rather fit both in. I don’t see a CB out there who can make a difference. Then again we should have Bryant back later in the year which will no doubt help a lot versus what Cam Lewis offers. I really like the idea of adding Deforest Buckner. We’d immediately have a good front. Jarrett is playing well this year. Sweat is still a strong DE. Booker and Turner appear to be capable of giving good snaps in rotation and FWIW Dayo will return later in the year. From the AI: "If the Chicago Bears were to trade for DeForest Buckner immediately, they would take on approximately $8.67 million in salary cap hit for the remainder of the 2026 season. "