The Deuce: I haven’t followed the Bears that closely but one problem with the trade down advice…

…is the point you made here, and which was made several times below, that the current Bears front office seems to be bad to very bad at making picks in the 3rd and 4th rounds, and not great in the second.

Now, an ideal strategy includes them being good at their job, but given actual performance, sticking in the first and making a real value pick there is probably better than the alternative.

But even given that pick, it does seem like trading up in the second to get one of the edge players was the best choice on day 2.

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1. The Bears penchant for severely overdrafting players vs consensus in the name of repeating "we let the board speak to us" is concerning. Being a prisoner to the board is going to lead to bad value when you could have drafted a player 1, 2 or even 3 rounds later by reading the room.

2. At some point, you have to invest draft capital in the defensive line if you want to make your pass rush better. This is the 2nd draft in a row where one of the deepest positions in the early rounds was edge rusher and they didn't come away with any. And how the board was going to fall before 57 was very predictable, I mentioned it prior to the draft and the team even mentioned that their edge targets were gone by the first half of the second round.

3. There was another way to play this that I liked much better and a super easy way to see how it'd turn out. The Bears could have traded back in the first round and still gotten an edge early 2nd. This is what the Bills did, who picked 1 pick after the Bears at 26. You'd presume that all of their deals could have been done by the Bears. Bills picked up an early 3rd and late 4th in the process.

At the outset of the draft, I would have been over the moon if the Bears had done the Bills deals, drafted TJ Parker (or if he wasn't your flavor, Zion Young/Gabe Jacas) and picked up 66 and 125.

Bears draft could have looked something like (even keeping guys they already drafted):
35. TJ Parker
57. Emmanuel McNeil-Warren
66. Logan Jones
69. Sam Roush
89. Zavian Thomas
124. Malik Muhammad
125. Skyler Bell

etc etc

I would have still hated the 3rd round picks, but at least you picked up more ammo.

4. The Bears first 4 picks in this draft were S, C, TE and KR/gadget guy. Not exactly a bonanza of guys at premium positions.

5. The Bears now have used a 1st and a 3rd round pick in TE over Poles tenure. He has used 2 picks on edges: 5th for Dom Rob and a 5th for Austin Booker. Shemar Turner was announced as a DT, but if you want to throw him in here, sure. Point still holds.

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And we didn't do a dumb thing. Day two just kind of sucked overall. Jones is the best pick of the three, but he is like 24.5 years old, and it felt early. I don't get using an early third on a TE3 and a late third on a gadget/ST guy. There was a run on TEs, sure, but given our roster that is just a total luxury pick.

I liked day 3.

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Welcome to the Outlier Draft.

The best players? All at "non-premium" positions. The 3 guys I think that can't miss are a running back, a safety, and an off-ball LB.

The prospects at premium positions all have a major flaw. The best pass rusher has T-Rex arms. The best offensive tackles might actually be guards. The best QB thinks whole milk is spicy.

Trying to figure out who goes where is a dart throw. Well, to be fair, it's always a dart throw. It's *especially* a dart throw this year, ok? Trying to figure out which team is going to be ok overlooking which weakness is going to be damn near impossible.

In the thread below, I'll make some posts about my thoughts on the different positions to get into more specific discussions on players.