Is anyone optimistic about next season?

Jack Lantern

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Pace can't ill afford a repeat of 2019 and dump 5 million on scrubs like Mike Davis who carried the ball 11 times for 25 yards, LOL or have his top free agent tight end Trey Burton suit up for 8 games and end up with 24 catches for 84 yards.

2020 needs to be near all hits for Pace on the O side of the ball to compensate for all his yearly whiffs
 

Neckbeard

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If Miller gets his shoulder right he can be a good slot guy. Daniels needs to work on his strength but is another that could still pan out. Montgomery will be fine with better run blocking/scheme.
 

Monster

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Monster is always high on the Bears in the off season.
Then the optimistic homer in him is slowly beat to death....
 

Urlacher_24

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I generally try to remain optimistic and hopeful about this team, but so far I don't have confidence in the early coaching moves.
  • I didn't want to lose Helfrich- I would have much rather seen some games where he called plays. Now granted, I don't know for certain that he didn't call plays, but it sure seemed like every time on offense it was always Nagy who was speaking into the QB radio. You know with some teams, there are offensive systems that you know have game-planned well and you know their scripted plays, usually the first 8-10 offensive plays, are going to lead to an efficient opening drive with a possible score. New Orleans is one of those teams- you always know they're going to at least move the ball on their first drive. With the Bears, the opposite is true. You could almost always assume that the Bears would open their first several drives with 3 and outs. These coaches could not put an effective offensive game-plan together to save their lives. So my questions around the OC position are: is Nagy the problem? Will he insist on calling the plays when a new OC comes in? And will his insistence on calling plays deter a quality OC from coming in?
  • I'm not yet sold on Juan Castillo.
  • Pace and Nagy seemed to have doubled down on their previous decisions. Committing to Mitch as the starter? Why do that now? Mitch has not consistently played like an NFL starter. Now I get the part about the running game generally sucking for much of the year and the offensive line not playing well, but at the end of the 2018 season, my feeling about Mitch was I saw some good things by Mitch and plenty of "WTF was that moments?" where his footwork led to wildly inaccurate passes with no ability to hit anyone deep downfield. "Give him another year in the system, and he'll improve." Well he's had another year in the system, and we still see occasional good moments but still far too many wildly inaccurate passes (again, mostly due to inconsistent footwork) and too many "WTF moments."
  • When Nagy defiantly stated in an interview this season, "I didn't come here to run the I-formation" (or something along those lines), well, my question is, if it's working, why the heck not? Don't try to be the "cute" genius that can't adjust your play calling to your team's strengths and weakness. Actually, that's my biggest criticism of Nagy- he does exactly that. Nagy seems to think he's still in Kansas City and has world class speed all over his roster. He does not. And if your offensive line is happy because they're knocking mother-fuckers off the ball in the I-formation and you're moving the ball (albeit slowly), then dammit beat the living crap out of that defense.
  • Harry Hiestand coached a helluva college offensive line. Yeah, this line sucked. But how much of that was because of system, players
I’m very optimistic. Mitch improved a lot as the season went on. The schedule is definitely easier as well. I have a good feeling much of the OL needs will be filled in the off season as well as the TE position. Hopefully they add in more I formation runs into the playbook. But mostly because Mitch improved a lot as the season went on.
 

gilder121

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I'm optimistic that:
1) The front office isn't blind and knows that Mitch isn't the guy and that they need to get better.
2) A different quarterback will materially impact the plays Nagy calls.
3) The defense will still be good.
4) The running game won't be as bad. Probably still won't be good, but it's tough to stay that bad.
5) I still have reasonable hope for Nagy.

I'm pessimistic in that:
1) I don't trust Pace to build an offense. He seems especially deficient at the QB position.
2) I think if it's just a Vet backup to Mitch and not at least a bridge guy then the Bears still probably miss the playoffs.
3) Pace didn't leave himself with many assets to really improve.

All in all, if they get more talent at O line, TE, QB, this could easily be a playoff team. They weren't far off, but they need to actually fix the problems with limited resources.
 

ChiKhan

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Not that much faith because of Pace. My gut instinct tells me not only is he going to start Mitch the whole year he's going to bring in shitty competition for Mitch.
 

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