Windy City Gridiron
Following yet another eventful offseason, the Chicago Bears looked primed for a breakout season. Although football is never played on paper, we’ll take a deeper dive into the offseason activity, and which three positions have improved the most.
The offseason chaos is quickly coming to an end as both the major components of free agency and the 2025 NFL Draft are in the rearview mirror. Teams will now focus on their offseason programs before a six-week break until training camp. Change has become one of the few constants for organizations like the Chicago Bears. Despite retaining Ryan Poles as the team’s general manager for a fourth season, new head coach Ben Johnson’s new mentality has been almost as visible as his new coaching staff in the early months of his tenure.
Johnson and Poles didn’t take long to deliver on their promise to upgrade in the trenches. Between free agency and the draft, the Bears spent most of their resources on both sides of the lines. If the Super Bowl wasn’t evident enough, the best teams in the league often have the best lines on both sides of the ball.
Once they take the field for Week 1 in the regular season, their goal will be solely to earn their first winning season since 2018. With the regular season still four months away, we’ll look back at the offseason and discuss three of the roster’s most improved areas.
Heading into free agency, Trey Smith was a name all Bears fans circled on their list of likely targets. A few days into the combine, the Kansas City Chiefs surprised most by slapping the franchise tag on the 25-year-old. Count me in as one of the many people who grew immediately skeptical of the Bears’ plan moving forward. Shortly after the combine concluded, Chicago swung a pair of trades on back-to-back days, landing Jonah Jackson and Joe Thuney.
The acquisition of Jackson drew plenty of criticism, especially considering how much was left on his contract, which was signed a year earlier. It felt like the Rams were looking for a way out, and the Bears gave it to them without much of a fight. In reality, Johnson simply wanted a player he could trust and believed was still at the top of their game. Jackson is still just 28 years old and just one year removed from signing a lucrative free agent deal in Los Angeles. It’s not out of the question that returning to a familiar scheme could bring out his Pro Bowl potential.
The Thuney deal came as much more of a surprise to the NFL world. Nobody knew that he was available. Until The Athletic’s Diana Russini reported that the Bears were having trade discussions with the Chiefs, everyone assumed the Chiefs would find a way to make it work. For a future fourth-round pick (that the Bears already recouped), they’ll be getting one of the best interior linemen in all of football. Granted, he’s...
