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If the Bears don’t get their next starting quarterback via trade, or sign a free agent when the league year begins on March 17, that doesn’t mean the team is forced to trot Nick. Mad on the ground in 2021. Of course, there is always the draft. For the first time since 2018, the Bears have a first-round pick, so this could be a great opportunity to draft a new face for the franchise, right? Well, by the time the Bears’ pick arrives at No. 20 overall, many of the big names could already be off the board.
However, Sunday Night Football’s Chris Simms said on Monday he believes a quarterback with a first-round draft rating could go down on April 29: Trey Lance.
“Trey Lance is the one that really intrigues me,” Simms said. “For me right now, just based on my screening, people have Trey Lance in the top 10, I don’t see that at all. I mean, at all. For me my first statement would be, Trey Lance is way too high and Mac Jones is way too low. I bet you it does come back at some point.
Our own Adam Hoge agrees, and even had Lance go to the Bears at No.20 overall in his first mock draft after the Super Bowl. In this simulation project, Hoge listed several reasons why Lance could fall into the hands of the Bears and why writing Lance carries some risk.
“There are legitimate questions about the level of competition (FCS) and its development, especially since Lance has only played in one game in 2020,” Hoge said. “And that’s coming from the staff assessors I’ve spoken to – not me. While the state of North Dakota uses a pro-style attack, the 2019 playbook was very basic and the Bison rarely opened it with Lance’s big arm. In fact, in 19 career games, Lance has not attempted more than 23 assists in a game twice. In total, there are only 318 successful assessment attempts in college. To put that into perspective, Trevor Lawrence, Zach Wilson and Mac Jones all threw over 318 passes in 2020 alone and the only reason Justin Fields was capped at 225 this season is because the state of Ohio only played eight games. But even Fields has 618 career success attempts to assess.
However, Simms’ reservations about Lance’s prospects in the NFL run a little deeper.
“I know he only played one game, but I would be very concerned about the way he threw the ball,” Simms said. “I would even be concerned about what they called the game. It shows you that they are even afraid to throw the ball with him. Even the tapes from before that, from last year, it’s a top notch approach. He has a very wild movement. The ball can go anywhere with it. So this is an area where, at the very beginning, I think it is overrated based on my TV screening.
To be fair, Simms said it was all based on the first impressions he got, watching the games at home. He’s going to start going deeper into each of those QBs starting this week.
On the other hand, Hoge also wrote about why Lance could be a great choice for the Bears after watching his only game in 2020, despite some of the concerns.
“As a rookie in the red shirt in 2019, all Lance did was go 16-0, win a national championship, complete 66.9% of his passes, throw 2,786 yards, throw 28 touchdowns and to run for 14 others. Oh, and he didn’t throw a single interception. That is true. Lance played his 17th career college game on Saturday without any interceptions.
“Lance can run, but he’s also nervous and can tackle with his strength. It’s a pretty deadly combination. The arm is very strong and while I still think there is something to be proven with accuracy, you can’t really quibble with a guy without an interception in a full season of college football, even at FCS level. Another strength is the attack in which he plays. The Bison snuggles up, they perform games under the center with game-action, and they perform games out of the shotgun. They run the ball and the tight ends are heavily involved. It’s not a very exotic offense, but it does translate into the NFL and quite honestly there are similarities to what the Bears raced in 2020. ”
None of this back-and-forth is new. Each year we dissect the details of each quarterback trying to discern who will have the best career. There were pros and cons that Scouts found in Mitchell Trubisky’s corpus, just as there were pros and cons that Scouts found in Patrick Mahomes’ corpus.
Evaluating talent for a quarterback is one of the hardest things to do in the NFL. Unfortunately for the Bears, they find themselves doing it for the second year in a row.
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