My take on Pace is that he deserves the benefit of the doubt.
- Look at the roster he inherited. Beyond Alshon, Long (injuries) and Fuller (underwhelming and injuries) there were no long-term building blocks on the roster for him to work with. Guys like Forte and Briggs were on their last legs. You had some decent players like Willie Young around here and there. The team for so many years before that was all cobbled together by free agent signings since Angelo and Emery were so bad at drafting before that. The occasional hit was made up for by 5 bad picks before that. Pace was tasked with primarily performing in the draft and had an old team with Cutler in place at QB, at a time when everyone know by then that he wasn't going to take the team anywhere. Combine that with him being young an inexperienced, he had a lot of stuff to change.
- He hired an experienced head coach in John Fox, which is the first that that had ever happened here. Give him props for recognizing that he and the team would benefit more from having a guy around who knew how to run things. He was never a great coach but by all accounts, he's always been a stand-up guy who empowered his coaching staff and always did right by his players. The team needed a culture change after the Trestman disaster and Fox helped get their feet under them, with a bad roster and a whole lot of turnover. Everyone knew he was a temporary stop-gap.
- Pace has brought in some good talent. Such a shame White couldn't stay healthy but he also picked up Goldman and Amos in that draft. The next: Floyd, Whitehair, Bullard, Kwiatkiowski and Howard. Last year: Trubisky, Cohen, Shaheen and Jackson. He's brought in some real talent through the draft, much of it in the later rounds.
- McPhee was a miss, and last year he had to sign a bunch of bums to one year contracts cause people knew Fox was a dead man walking. It was a bunch of stop-gaps cause we were still turning the roster over. He let a bunch of old guys walk again. This year, he's got guys like Allen Robinson really wanting to come play here, among others. We'll see how they all work out but with a roster on the upswing and a promising young QB in the fold, the roster arrow is pointing way up. He's pretty primed to turn probably an overall negative free-agent signing record into a more positive or neutral one.
- Lastly, Nagy is unproven but you've got to love what you've seen so far. His energy, his knowledge, and his humility in how he talks about his other coaches is great. It says a lot about a guy who can convince Vic Fangio to come back. He grabbed Helfrich and he got Childress to come in and help as well. Combine all that with his own knowledge and the early returns look like him and Pace are a nice match and Nagy appears to be a modern NFL coach who can coach a modern NFL offense.
There's been misses along the way but what can you realistically expect? I think if anyone here vehemently hates Pace, thinks he's done a bad job or thinks that the Bears aren't good enough yet are really underestimating the dire situation he took over. Look at teams like the Cubs and the Blackhawks. It takes time and a lot of losing to not only turn a bad roster over but to change the culture and lay the ground work for a sustainable model of winning. I personally can't ask for much more than the Bears have going on right now considering how bad things have been for so long. Pace appears to have a real shot at making us relevant contenders in the NFL for quite a while now and i'm pretty thankful for that. There wasn't much of a reason for me to be talking about the Bears on a message board for a long time before now.