I'm most concerned with protecting Fields and giving him a weapon or two to evaluate his ability to read defenses and make good decisions when not running for his life. I hope we continue to get a FA or two on the line and maybe a WR if the right option is there and then draft some playmakers, Oline depth, etc. We have to make sure we know what we have in Fields by the end of this season so we can plan for the future confidently. If the defense has several stop gap players filling in holes in the process, so be it.
I think all of us are concerned about that.
But what I am seeing so far, I'm okay with.
The plans obviously seems to be geared towards loading up next year. We got a brand new center with some nasty to him, which arguably was the weakest position on the entire offensive line we had.
We picked up some high upside wide receivers who will be given a shot to fill out the third and fourth wide receiver spots respectively.
I get people are bitching, but it usually doesn't work signing a guy to be your number one wide receiver and free agency and you overpay.
Instead, what the Bears have done is moved themselves into position to draft a wide receiver and an offensive lineman in order to fill out holes on the offensive side of the roster.
Not sure how these guys are with wide receivers, but both are GM and assistant GM have long insignificant track records of being able to find quality offensive line talent in the draft, so I think knowing that they deserve the benefit of the doubt until they prove otherwise.
They will end up protecting Fields but using draft picks to do it. They may also be banking on the coaching for the offensive line last year being absolute horseshit and therefore are expecting improvement from Jenkins and white hair. Or maybe they get some quality in the draft and white hair becomes a liability they cut after June 1st.
One of the more interesting moves I saw was them resigning Simmons despite Simmons looking really bad last year. When you consider that they let Alex bars go as well as all the other free agents with the exception of the long snapper, it makes me wonder what they see in him.
The point is though, we still have the draft, we still have the second and third rounds of free agency, and we have the period after the draft where there will be even more cuts, and more on top of that after June 1st.
So still plenty of time to protect fields and add more weapons.