Bears have to consider all options, including Wentz
In a desperate world, team will be linked to every QB, whether he’s available or not
The weekend between the conference championship games and Super Bowl LV was filled with news of the blockbuster Matthew Stafford trade, and while the league waits for the Patrick Mahomes-Tom Brady showdown Sunday, it also is awaiting the next quarterback domino to fall.
The quarterback-needy teams — and the Bears are near the top of the list — will be linked to every passer, those readily available and those available in imagination only.
You can fill a notebook page with nothing but lines playing connect the dots, linking “Quarterback X” to the Bears, Indianapolis Colts, Denver Broncos, Washington Football Team, Carolina Panthers and others. Pretty soon the page will be filled with ink that you can’t make sense of, but the reality is there aren’t enough good quarterbacks to go around. Plenty of teams are scrambling after the Los Angeles Rams added Stafford and cajoled the Detroit Lions into taking Jared Goff and his cumbersome contract in exchange.
Odds that the Bears will be able to acquire Deshaun Watson, if the Houston Texans even make him available via trade, seem remote. Not Hail Mary remote, but like one of those wild returns with about 10 laterals. Those plays rarely work.
It’s difficult to envision a package of picks and players starting with the No. 20 pick in the draft would entice the Texans.
If the Bears are thinking the same way, they already have been holding conversations about every other potential option, which leads you down a road with countless forks in it: Derek Carr, Carson Wentz, Jimmy Garoppolo, Teddy Bridgewater, Sam Darnold, Jameis Winston, Marcus Mariota, Matt Ryan, Dak Prescott, Ryan Fitzpatrick, Alex Smith, Gardner Minshew and so on.
The Bears are canvassing all their options because running it back with Mitch Trubisky in 2021 seems about as likely as the chance they could win the Watson sweepstakes. The team gave it a go with the first-round pick for four seasons, and the last two were a real struggle for all involved. Similarly, I don’t believe Nick Foles will be the Week 1 starter.
General manager Ryan Pace and coach Matt Nagy are under a mandate to show “progress,” the word Chairman George McCaskey used last month, and Foles’ seven starts this season were alarming.
The Bears decided to give Pace and Nagy another swing at righting the ship despite a second straight 8-8 season and a wildcard-round loss to the New Orleans Saints. The GM and coach are not going to roll Trubisky or Foles out there with their careers on the line.
Until the Bears are able to acquire a quarterback, they’re going to be rumored to be in on all of the top names, and it could make for a dizzying run from this weekend until the start of the new league year March 17.
There was buzz Thursday that the Raiders were trying to trade Carr to the Bears. Wentz’s name replaced Carr’s on Friday, and the Bears will be at the forefront of nearly all the gossip because of the position they’re in — win or else.
“We are exploring lots of options,” Colts GM Chris Ballard said Friday afternoon during an appearance on “The Dan Dakich Show” on WDUZ-FM 107.5 in Indianapolis.
Like the Bears, the Colts lost in the first round of the playoffs. They had a 10-6 season and objectively have a roster with more pieces in place than the Bears. The only quarterback they have under contract is Jacob Eason, a 2020 fourth-round pick from Washington, so the Colts are going to be tied to every conversation for every imaginable quarterback as well.
“Everybody is like, ‘You’ve got to do whatever it takes,’ and they’re right,” Ballard said. “But you’ve got to be right. You can’t move up (in the draft) and take the wrong guy. History has proven that. If you just look at the last 10 years of drafts and the quarterbacks, the miss rate is a lot higher than it is for the hit rate. …
“There’s a fine line between being aggressive and desperate. We are not going to operate in a desperate world. That’s what the world does, that’s what Twitter does, that’s what people do.”
Pace and Nagy, however, are in as desperate of a spot as you can be in the NFL and no longer have time, having exhausted the rookie contract of a failed first-round quarterback.
The Wentz situation is interesting because Colts coach Frank Reich knows him well from his days as the offensive coordinator in Philadelphia. Bears quarterbacks coach John DeFilippo held that same position with the Eagles in 2017 when Wentz was playing at an MVP level before suffering a season-ending knee injury. The Bears liked Wentz a great deal when he was entering the draft in 2016.
Why would Eagles GM Howie Roseman be motivated to trade Wentz, whom he signed to a blockbuster extension in June 2019? It can’t be because Roseman knows Jalen Hurts, a second-round pick who made four starts at the end of his rookie season, is the solution.
If Roseman wants to get rid of Wentz (and his contract) — and the Eagles are known to have had conversations with other teams about trading him — could he emerge as a quarterback to lead the Bears, Colts or another team? Don’t underestimate Roseman’s ability as a wheeler and dealer — he once turned Sam Bradford into a first-round draft pick.
Any team acquiring Wentz would owe him $47.2 million guaranteed over the next two years, and that contract could lower the compensation required to acquire him. Wentz is coming off a terrible season for the Eagles, who didn’t have much around him, and would come with durability concerns. It would be telling if the Colts did not outbid the Bears for Wentz because no one knows the quarterback better than Reich.
Yes, Wentz would be familiar with Nagy’s offense, but that same line of thinking led the Bears to another former Eagles quarterback in Foles, and familiarity did not breed success.
Carr represents an interesting option, but his availability remains a question. Some around the league believe coach Jon Gruden will not want to part ways with him. Others are of the mind that Gruden is interested in seeing what the market will bear after the Stafford deal.
None of the options, short of perhaps Watson, will provide the intrigue the Tampa Buccaneers created when they signed Brady in March. They had a win-now roster and added the greatest quarterback the league ever has seen.
But it’s a quarterback-driven league, and with only one game remaining, the list of possibilities being linked to one or another is only going to grow.
Just remember: The Bears are operating in a desperate world.