Windy City Gridiron
It’s finally draft week! For Chicago Bears fans, this signals the last significant piece to the offseason puzzle before a three month long wait until Training Camp. We’ll dive into plenty of draft thoughts, a future cap outlook, and what to expect post-draft.
One of the best sports weekends of the year is here. The 2025 NFL Draft will kick off Thursday night in Green Bay, and all 32 teams will go into the first round with their own selection for the first time in a while. After one of the more shallow classes in recent memory last year, the top end of this class isn’t looking much better. After finishing with a disappointing (5-12) record in 2024, the Chicago Bears are projected to make a Top 10 selection for the third straight year. Some might argue that their final win of the season against the Packers was more damaging than rewarding, but good general managers find talent, regardless of where they are picking.
That’s what general manager Ryan Poles will be looking to do. After an active start to free agency that saw him land five impact players, the Bears have remained largely silent over the last month. We’ll dive into what to expect from Chicago next weekend and how their future cap outlook could influence how they approach the draft. It’s time to get into all that and more in a special draft edition of 10 Bears Takes.
1. For Bears fans, heading into the draft without a single glaring starting need for the upcoming season must feel good.
We’ve all been here before, right? The Bears go out, make some promising coaching hires, are aggressive in free agency, and cap it off with what everyone feels is an A+ draft class. Optimism runs high through training camp and the preseason, and then once it’s time to deliver on that hype, they fall flat on their face and end up picking in the Top 10 the next year.
I won’t convince myself that things will be different until we see how it plays out in the regular season. Luckily for Bears fans, Jaylon Johnson will make sure to keep everyone grounded. Even so, things do feel different this time around, don’t they? For the first time in forever, it appears that the front office has addressed the issues that everyone else with eyes has been seeing. At least on paper, the offensive line is no longer a giant mess filled with coaching and front office favorites. They went out, spent the resources, and brought in three plus-starters for the interior. The defensive line has been an issue since Vic Fangio departed for Denver in 2019, but it appears that they are finally realizing that simply trying to draft and develop a league-average defensive line wasn’t going to be good enough, and it would take too much time.
This isn’t to say that the Bears aren’t going into next weekend without clear areas of improvement. The offensive line needs...
