Even Bears Employees Were Stunned Ryan Pace Wasn’t Fired In 2021
If you polled Chicago Bears fans after the 2020 season, most of them wouldn’t said they wanted GM Ryan Pace and head coach Matt Nagy gone. Playoff appearance aside, it was obvious the team was trending in the wrong direction. Players had no discipline. There were ceaseless problems at quarterback. Nagy had already gutted his coaching staff once already with no effect. That division title in 2018 was a distant memory. A smart organization would recognize this and start fresh. George McCaskey disagreed, opting to keep the two in charge for another year.
Fans and media alike couldn’t believe it. Ownership was giving two guys clearly on the hot seat full control of team resources despite the roster showing signs of degradation. At a time when things called for caution and forward-thinking, Pace and Nagy threw more future resources away, desperately trying to fix the quarterback problem. Nobody knew it at the time, but it turns out even those inside Halas Hall were shocked the two men weren’t fired. Tyler Dunne of Go Long revealed this in a recent two-part article.
This made no sense to people on both sides of the equation — personnel and coaching.
“You don’t let the GM trade up to draft quarterback,” says one Bears source in those draft meetings. “You just don’t let him do it. You are asking to be stuck in quarterback purgatory. You know you’re going to fire him and you’re picking 11th. It’s not like we were picking the first quarterback in the draft. We were taking a swing on Mac Jones or Justin Fields. And there’s a really good chance that the next regime that comes in isn’t going to like him.”
If the plan was to draft a quarterback, one ex-Bears assistant coach adds, then fire the head coach or give him an extension. Give him a real chance to develop a project.
Instead, the Bears chose purgatory.
“The Bears are just so f–ked up,” this coach says.
Ryan Pace ended up setting the Bears back even further.
He’d already done that once when he drafted Mitch Trubisky over Patrick Mahomes in 2017, an all-time whiff at quarterback. Giving somebody like that another swing at the position is almost never a good idea. Justin Fields was an outstanding physical talent. Everybody knew that. However, his fall in the 1st round happened for a reason. Other teams had lingering concerns about him. The general theory was his somewhat slow processor when reading coverages. Some hoped more time and experience would help with that.
It didn’t.
What made it worse was the support structure in place. Ryan Pace had never been great at finding offensive talent. His best additions since arriving in 2015 were Allen Robinson, Bobby Massie, Tarik Cohen, and David Montgomery. Two of those names were free agent signings, and the others were running backs. He routinely failed at drafting receivers and offensive linemen, which is not ideal for a young quarterback prone to holding the ball. Nobody should’ve been shocked when things went wrong.
The Bears had no business giving him another year. Doing so likely set them back another three or four years, as Ryan Poles had to come in and clean up his mess.