adam

Yeah, but the media is eating them up. Daniels in MVP talks and the Commanders are magically a top 5 team in the NFL. They had a cream puff schedule and then had the easiest path in the playoffs. I think Daniels is a better passer than Fields, but the frame scares the hell out of me. He is one hit away from being out for the year. I read something about what Kingsbury did, and it was essentially one read, checkdown, then scramble. Pre-snap determines first read, hike the ball, first read yes or no, checkdown yes or no, then scramble. This allowed Daniels to get the ball out of his hands but it also didn't really have him doing too much processing. That can only get you so far.

I have seen a lot of projections with the Bears automatically losing to WAS in Week 6. Besides the Bears beating them last year before that ridiculous hail mary, this is who they faced the last 6 weeks of their season, and they lost to Cooper Rush, then won 5 straight. Their signature win on the season was a Week 3 win over Joe Burrow and the winless Bengals.

There is a lot of data on Johnson, it just depends on how you want to skin the cat. The obvious thing is it will be basically impossible to be worse than last year, and just based on normal trends, the Bears should see a 12-15% bump in all offensive statistical categories (Yardage, scoring, EPA/P, etc), if not more. I am thinking closer to 20% because the 2024 Bears were really bad. Johnson has the 2nd highest Success Rate for a play caller since 2020 at 43.38%, behind Monken, but Monken got a lot of that from Lamar's scrambles. Either way, the Bears are going to be ahead of the sticks. We are so used to playing from behind the sticks. This will feel weird. For Scoring%, the Lions are 2nd in the NFL in scoring rate over the last 3 seasons at 45.1%, only 0.3% behind BUF. CHI has been a raw 10% lower, or close to a 25% difference. Last year DET was 51.6%, which was the highest rate going back to 2020. So combined, no team has been more efficient moving the ball AND scoring over the last few years than Johnson's offense. Another wild one is that Goff got better under Johnson than he was with McVay. McVay needed Stafford. Goff went up over 6% on comp% and 5% on catchable ball rate, and a whole bunch of raw stats increased (TDs up, INTs down, QB Rating up).

I thought he was omitting OL altogether and stating they had Gibbs, Williams, and either (LaPorta/St. Brown) as mismatch players? For OL, Sewell and Decker are clearly better on the outside, but on the interior, they lost Zietler, so it would seem that Dalman+Thuney+Jackson has the edge over Ragnow+Glasgow+Ratledge at this moment. Also, how will Detroit's offense look without Johnson and the coaches that left?

The only statement I saw was that Caleb said no one from the team "told him what to watch". That doesn't mean he doesn't know "how" to watch tape or that he didn't.

No, as far I can tell, that is only for the offseason 90-man roster, which the league gives exemptions for international players (1 per roster).

I think the Bears are a year away from an all-in type of move and it feels like they will want to shape the roster more to Johnson's liking. and they also have to be 100% Caleb is the guy for Johnson's offense.

Yeah I agree, Hunter seems like a good athlete, but not someone you spend that much draft capital on.

So with the new rule added in 2023, there is a good chance they go with 3 QBs on the 53-man. Without a 3rd QB, you can only have 48 players active on game day, so 5 players on the 53-man don't dress every week. However, the 3rd QB does not count towards the 48. So if they did keep Keenum, he would take up a 53-man slot but would not impact the game-day 48-man roster (and would actually make it 49).

and looking ahead capwise, there are some easy decisions to free up a ton of cap in 2026: 1. Edmunds - $17.4M Cap Hit, $2.4M dead money if cut/traded (Potential Cap Savings: $15M) 2. Kmet - $11.6M Cap Hit, $3.2M dead money if cut/traded (Potential Cap Savings: $8.4M) 3. Swift - $8.8M Cap Hit, $1.3M dead money if cut/traded (Potential Cap Savings: $7.5M) Easy way to free up $31M w/o restructuring. I am not saying that will but I would suspect Edmunds and Swift are the most likely of those 3, Kmet is just there because of his cap savings.

It is going to be hard to comprehend what we are seeing on the O-Line this year. Thuney didn't allow a sack in 2024 lol. That is just absurd:

This also makes the trade for Thuney even more of a steal. They traded him for a 4th, which they got back in the Rams trade anyway.

Watching training camp videos of Travis Hunter compared to real WRs, I think JAX made a mistake trading away all that draft capital for him when they could've had Jeanty+BTJ. Hunter will still be a great CB, but I don't think he will ever even get to Hester level at WR. He will be more of a gadget guy, Jet Sweep, Fly, Post.

Make it 10 if you count Trapilo now that Thuney was extended.

Extended:

If you consider Trapilo as the eventual starter at LT, the entire starting OLine is on contract or cost-controlled (5th year option for Wright) thru 2027, which is Year 4 of Caleb's rookie deal. If you extend that to the rest of the offense, you can include Williams, Moore, Odunze, Burden, Kmet, and Loveland. That is insane. RB is the position not signed thru 2027 (Swift and Roschon signed thru 2026). Outside of RB, the 2026 draft will be defensive heavy (Edge, Safety, DT, LB).

He will get a $1.5M raise annually from his current AAV of $16M, which only bumps him up one spot from 5th highest paid LG to the 4th highest. By this time next year, when the actual extension kicks in, he will probably be out of the top 5.

This O-Line is now locked in for a few years. As long as they figure out who starts at LT (Jones/Trapilo), I like having this type of continuity.

Here are the QB matchups with what we know today. Depending on how you view Caleb, there will only be a handful of games where the other team has the better QB. Right now BAL and CIN? I don't think Goff w/o Johnson is better than Caleb w/ Johnson. I think Caleb is at least comparable to Hurts, Daniels, Purdy, and Love. Week 1 - McCarthy (first pro start) Week 2 - Goff - 6th QBR Week 3 - Prescott (3rd game back since injury + new HC) Week 4 - Geno Smith (new team) Week 5 - BYE WEEK Week 6 - Daniels - 4th QBR Week 7 - Rattler/Shough Week 8 - Jackson - 1st QBR Week 9 - Burrow - 3rd QBR Week 10 - Wilson/Dart Week 11 - McCarthy Week 12 - Rudolph/(Rodgers)? Week 13 - Hurts - 10th QBR Week 14 - Love - 5th QBR Week 15 - Pickett/Flacco/Gabriel/Sanders Week 16 - Love - 5th QBR, Love vs CHI in 2024 (1 TD, 1 INT) Week 17 - Purdy - 7th QBR Week 18 - Goff - 6th QBR (Goff outdoors in January) 9 games against top 10 QBR QBs, 8 games against non-top 10 QBR QBs. I expect Caleb to be a top-12 QB this year for QBR.

It's exhausting to be honest. There are so many other little things like hiring Jauron after announcing Dave McGinnis. Not that hiring McGinnis was the answer, he was terrible too. It was the entire process that led to the team announcing it before it was a done deal. EmBearassing. How about going with Trestman over Arians? That was fun too. Arians was the easy slam dunk and would've been crazy fun with Cutler at QB. Then with Eberflus, Dan Quinn was a final candidate. The only saving grace is the Bears would not have landed Johnson because Quinn would probably still be the HC right now.

It is crazy just how bad they were. Flus may be the only head coach to have his DC, OC, and RB Coaches all fired in season, then gets fired in season himself. Williams and Walker left in season in 2023, Waldron and Flus in 2024. In reality Flus should've never been hired, and or fired after every season. He took a 6-win team and somehow made it worse. Then because Fields willed the team to a few extra wins in 2023 he got a 3rd year. Which was again crazy. How does a guy like that get one of the top 32 positions for that career field? This continually supports the position that what Caleb did last year was even better all things considered. The coaching actually hurt him and was a detriment to his development and performance. I would not be surprised if every other rookie QB drafted last year fails miserably under the same conditions.

Here is a quote stating that it was "at times". I just thought it meant that when he was going to watch tape alone, no coach ever told him to watch something specific. Still coaching malpractice, but it seems par for the course with how bad the coaching staff was.

Check out this interview with Bagent. He thinks Caleb and Dexter are going to have breakout seasons. They try to be nice about the former staff, but Bagent is super excited about the new staff and went up and down both sides of the ball praising the coaches. He also noted that the new staff is teaching them what they are responsible for on each play, what their job is on every play, very detail-oriented, connecting the dots, etc. Now one would think this occurs everywhere, but the fact that he states this as a difference leads me to believe that they were just running plays last year. He mentions "teaching" several times in this interview. He also mentioned how awesome it is to have JT Barrett and Case Keenum in the QB Room. He said that Keenum has already helped him change his routine. That's awesome. I would not have any issues keeping 3x QBs on the roster if Keenum is that big of an influence.

He had to wait for the ball too, which made his overall route slower than it could've been. Swift and Roschon didn't look bad, but Monangai for a rookie has some quick twitch.

Yeah, people make the 4K Passing season a big deal, but the entire passing offense ineptitude has to end this year and with this group. Yep, and even if one of them doesn't pan out, the odds of all of them failing are close to zero.