ANDY DAWN: BEARS TO SIGN QB DALTON
Longtime Bengal and ex-Cowboy will receive a one-year, $10 million contract
It turns out that general manager Ryan Pace’s grand plan to fix the Bears’ quarterback problem was something he easily could’ve done a year ago.
The team will sign Andy Dalton to a oneyear, $10 million deal, a source said, a year after choosing to trade a fourth-round pick for Nick Foles and committing to him for three seasons rather than signing Dalton on the cheap.
Pace always gets his man in the end — as long as his man isn’t Deshaun Watson or Russell Wilson.
Bringing in Dalton as the presumptive starter for 2021 can best be described as “dispiriting.” He is not a solution. He is better than Foles, but so is pretty much everyone. Even Mitch Trubisky was.
But this team needed more than a microupgrade at QB.
The Bengals spent nine years trying to decide whether Dalton, a three-time Pro Bowl pick, was a franchise quarterback and ultimately determined he wasn’t. The rest of the NFL apparently agreed, considering he ended up taking a one-year, $3 million deal as a backup in Dallas.
So the Bears have gone from shelling out for a guy the Jaguars were ecstatic to get rid of to scooping up a guy the Bengals dumped. Maybe the next move is trading for Sam Darnold, a quarterback the Jets are bailing on as soon as they can.
Dalton topped 92 in passer rating once, in his career year. He had 25 touchdown passes, seven interceptions and a 106.2 passer rating in 2015, and while the Bears will surely tout his history with offensive coordinator Bill Lazor (like they did with Foles and Matt Nagy), those two didn’t work together until the next season.
In 2015, Dalton had an All-Pro left tackle, a Pro Bowl tight end, an above-average run game and A.J. Green in his prime. The situation he’s stepping into now is just a little bit different. If this is another QB like Foles, who will only thrive when everything around him is perfect, the Bears are wasting their time.
In Dalton’s other nine seasons, including 11 games with the Cowboys last year, his numbers were Trubisky-esque: 61.8% completion rate, 232.8 yards per game, a 1.6-to-1 TD-tointerception ratio and an 85.9 passer rating.
How could Pace possibly bet his future employment on Dalton?
Because he had few other choices. He was in a no-win situation of hoping a moon shot idea like Watson or Wilson would bail out the Bears, and it was a free fall from
there to the backup plans.
There was no good answer other than those two. Marcus Mariota, Jameis Winston, Ryan Fitzpatrick — there’s not a guy on that list who would’ve vaulted the Bears into Super Bowl contention. Dalton is just another guy, and the Bears have cycled through plenty of those types the last three decades.
That being said, it was a predicament of his own making. He traded up to draft Trubisky when Watson and Patrick Mahomes were available. He made an almost equally damaging mistake by trading for Foles last season. From the creator of “We Signed Mike Glennon” comes the new smash hit, “I Guess We’ll Take Andy Dalton.”
It’s not Pace’s fault that he failed to convince the Seahawks to trade Wilson. It is his fault that the 2021 season hinged on that fantasy in the first place.
The only big swing left to take is in the draft, and the last person anyone wants making that call is Pace.
With the Bears picking 20th, he’ll have to outfox the rest of the NFL and trade up to steal one of the top five QBs or drift back because he knows something about one of the second-tier prospects that no one else does.
The future rests on that. Good luck.