DABEARSDABOMB

This is horrible. Young was looking like a valuable piece. Now two guys who play critical positions will be coming back from significant / difficult to recover from injuries (Houston / Young). The one good thing is, reports are both should be ready by training camp. The real question is how much explosion will they lose?

I want whomever they think is the best football coach, not who is best for Jay Cutler. If Shanny is that guy, great, lets do it. If it is Harbaugh, great, but I don't want to hire our coach based upon who is right for Jay Cutler. Lets not do round peg / square hole again.

Gould is a very sharp guy. I appreciate you passing on those comments and right now I'm of the opinion that our best short and long-term shots at winning involve keeping Jay around while our new coach comes in and builds up the rest of the football team. This hopefully allows us to win in the short-term while at the same time, we draft someone we feel can be the longer term answer. It is very difficult to find even average QB's in this league and Jay is at the very least that. I think we should erase everyone from the organization who made this year actually happen (GM and HC) and unless the next regime thinks Jay needs to be a part of that, given his cost (to keep or trade him), I just can't see justify getting rid of him. If one of the top 2 QB's were available with our 1st round pick, than I would think differently here but I don't expect that to be the case.

Caught this nugget out of a David Haugh article:

Who knows. Either way, I could see legitimate reasons for why the Bears would be having significant conversations with teams in need of a QB. I also think the Titans are a very likely potential landing spot.

No idea validity of this but literally 4 people at work came by in last 5 minutes asking me if it was true, haha, so apparently this has been pretty widely reported. Probably a lot of junk but I presume nothing is to prevent teams from discussing hypothetical trades even though deadline hasn't been reached so I could see a scenario where that is the case. I just question why we would allow our current management team to make any sort of deal, unless of course, some people are sticking around (or the McCaskey's feel so strongly / needed this type of assurance that they could move him with the logic being they had to know 100% that they could dump Cutler because that would lessen the blow of the costs they'd have to eat to get rid of current clowns + significantly better management / coaches).

What RB was that? Was that James Allen? I don't remember him saying it was weed but I remember him fumbling all the damn time.

I think you'd view him as a president...not the GM. You'd bring in a young talent evaluator and let them be the GM but with football people running the house. My personal choice is Ron Wolf in a high level president role with Harbaugh being the HC and a young whippersnapper who is a good scout, etc, being the GM with Wolf really grooming him (or Polian but I don't think Polian is interested in it).

All that said, I don't think it is a realistic expectation to get Holmgren and a high profile head coach and I think with a guy like Harbaugh out there it is critical for us to go after him hard.

Holmgren has been successful everywhere but Cleveland and in Cleveland he had to go through ownership hell. I think he would be a fantastic hire.

Completely agree with you.

I have zero problem with Winston the QB. I think he's handsdown the best QB to come out since Luck from a pure skills perspective is worthy of being the top pick. The real question is how does he grade out from an intangible perspective, has he matured, what is the real story behind some of the issues, etc. Dude is the anti-Cutler when you look at his ability to win, make plays late, etc. Played in a pro offense and has handled absurd pressure. I still don't think the writing is on the wall yet with Cutler. If the next coach thinks Jay can work in the short-term while the team builds up other areas, than I could see us drafting a QB in the 2nd / 3rd round territory and being a little patient. If we plan to move Jay, than I don't see any scenario where you don't take a QB very early. It isn't like we have some great in-house option. Fales probably isn't that guy either. He was drafted to play in Trestman's system so unless the next guy likes him, he's probably gone.

Late round draft picks have very high failure rates. A lot of them get picked and very few turn into Brady / Russell. Flacco was a very high pick. To me, I'm looking at guys that play in pro-systems if I am drafting them early. I just can't use an early pick on a spread offense guy.

Completely agree. He has come out of this looking like a rose and a much more mature person than he was 3 or 4 years ago. His time has come to an end but he has been very professional during this saga.

Totally agree.

If this really was Trestman's call, it would appear to be the first time he's ever disciplined anyone. I wonder if he's finally snapped and said, fine, I'm doing this and maybe everyone will realize it.

Sounds like Trestman & Company think Cutler has been a total mess and since they know they are going down, they are going to at least show that they can do it with far lesser QB's. I just think they made this decision too late. Had they done it 4 weeks ago, maybe it makes a difference.

These tweets are telling: @MikeSilver What I just said on @nflnetwork : Bears offensive players believe Clausen will 'light it up,' simply because he'll run offense as prescribed @MikeSilver I'm told Trestman felt he could no longer play Cutler 'simply to justify a contract' when his performance was so poor... @MikeSilver Also: Cutler has been looking great in practice but 'seeing ghosts' once he steps over the white lines... @MikeSilver I'm told it was a 'coaching decision' to bench Cutler for Clausen--meaning Trestman, not Emery, made this call. Silver later said he had 15 sources on this. 15!!! What does that say about the feelings for Cutler within the organization??

Makes sense. Awful.

Re: 09 - 11, how does that compare with the league?

I'm guessing this is probably Trestman saying, I'm not that bad, look at what I can do with Claussen, he isn't that bad. Or on the flip side, maybe Bears brass things Claussen will stink and it will be more evidence as to how bad the coaching was and thus give other teams looking at Cutler more hope that they can fix him? Otherwise it really doesn't make a lot of sense. One alternative theory I have is, Bears think Cutler is going to stick around, but they want to at least send a message to him to really shake him up and let him know his schtick can't continue so that he's more ready to accept a new coach? I don't know, might be grasping at straws here.

Dilfer?

This is surprising. I wonder who is pushing this. I wonder if someone is saying...before you dump Trestman, at least give him a shot with another QB to prove himself or if Trestman has finally spoke up? Would be very interesting to be a fly in the wall at halas hall.

I absolutely agree 1000% with what you are saying. I think it is hard for that coach to make that decision purely based on film and without having worked with the QB, though. I think the only real decision a coach could make is say look, I like his tools but he needs to work on x,y, and z. I can talk to him up front and get a gauge but until we go through an off-season and a season together, I won't know for certain. After this year I will know and in the meantime I don't buy into any of the QB's in this draft anyway blah blah blah.

It seems to be that if anything, we should have taken more of a hard line stance and done the same to Briggs / Tillman / Peppers and basically cleaned house so the new coaching scheme had their chance to put a stamp on things without veterans already placing blame. That seems to be what a lot of experts would think would be the right approach. To me I think there is a fine line between that and you need to know the character of those leaders and how they respond to change / handle change and also the personality of the coaches and track records of winning players over, etc, to better make that decision.