It’s safe to say the dead period has arrived regarding the Caleb Williams/Justin Fields debate.That’s the time when nothing new is coming out. With all the coach hirings finished and no information leaking about the situation, the media needs to feed the masses something.
So scraps from the past are recycled and offered up as fresh meat. That’s what has happened with a comment by Williams that he thinks he can do everything Patrick Mahomes can do. He actually made the comment in December of 2022. Now that’s really recycling old garbage.
Or the imagination then enters into it and bored media and fans conjure up their own ideas for trades to get Williams or for Fields.
Trading Places
Some of the trades being suggested for Fields or Williams cross the border between reality and fantasy, and then go straight into comical territory. Not all do, but plenty are jokes.
Joe Broback of Pro Football Network suggested the Vikings give the Bears the 11th pick (Round 1), the 42nd pick (Round 2), the 126th pick (Round 4) and first- and second-round picks the Vikings have in 2025 to get Williams and also acquire a sixth-round pick in exchange from the Bears.
Remember that a first-round pick in 2025 now carries only the value of the first pick in this year’s second round on the Jimmy Johnson draft pick value chart. The second-round pick next year is worth the same as Round 3’s first pick this year. So, in essence, the Bears would only be getting one first-round pick for letting the Vikings move all the way up to No. 1, and that first-rounder would be the 11th pick in this year’s draft. Then they’d get a load of second- or third-rounders and an assortment of other useless items.
The funniest thing about this offer is anyone would believe for even one half of a second that the Bears would trade the first pick of the draft to a team within their own division so they could face Williams twice a year, then they don’t really understand the NFL.
The other comical aspect is from the other side. Minnesota once gave away its future in draft picks to Dallas for Herschel Walker and it seems personnel evaluation is still as nutty as it ever was in the land of 10,000 lakes.
The Bears GM isn’t so desperate to improve the talent level of a team already on the rise so as to give a talented young QB to another team his team faces twice a year. Trading a player like Williams to a division rival could be Poles’ ticket out of town.
After Ryan Poles finished laughing, he would certainly politely say “no thanks” and hang up.
There would surely be other teams from outside the division, and preferably out of the conference, who are willing to give up a ransom for the first pick should the Bears wish to trade it.
Sean Payton’s Folly
Another such generated trade proposal comes from quarterback-starved Denver, where they seem to have discovered what Seattle learned about Russell Wilson a few years ago—that he should now be some other team’s problem.
However, this suggestion was based on one fact and that is Broncos coach Sean Payton really would like to have Williams as his quarterback to work with and build into an even better version of Drew Brees.
When Payton was on Colin Cowherd’s program prior becoming Broncos coach in November of 2022, he had nothing but praise to offer up about the USC QB.
“I think he’s a generational player,” Payton told Cowherd. “Especially with the relationship our league has in gaming now, at some point, we’re going to move to a lottery system in the NFL (for draft picks), right? Because this is a player that possibly does that where at the end of the season … clubs begin to lose to try to put themselves in that position.
“This player, I think, is the type of player that we would look back on in five years and say, ‘He’s why the lottery exists now.’ ”
Payton’s ridiculous comment about a lottery system aside—and it could be expected because Payton was the one who wanted pass interference reviewed by replay, which totally flopped—the part about his high opinion of Williams can’t be discounted.
This gave the trade-baiting media plenty to consider and the idea being floated is they could get Williams by offering up the Broncos’ first-round pick, No. 13 overall, and cornerback Patrick Surtain Jr. with several other picks.
The first problem with this is Surtain really does nothing for the Bears. It needs to be a star player at a position of need, just like DJ Moore was.
Jaylon Johnson is the No. 1 cornerback in the NFL already, according to Pro Football Focus. Rookie Tyrique Stevenson played better over the last six games than Johnson ever played in his own rookie year.
And rookie Terell Smith is held with high esteem by coaches after he played effectively starting in several games due to injuries. The Bears are about as set at cornerback as any NFL team could be. Although Surtain is an excellent player, the way to entice the Bears is offer them a real star three-technique defensive tackle or an edge rusher to complement Montez Sweat.
Or offer a superstar wide receiver still on their first contract, if there are any of those available.
Why Would the Bears Trade?
No one can be sure about what the Bears will do with the pick, but drafting Williams seems more and more likely with each passing week because of all the impressive play the USC QB put on film.
Poles said he’d need to be “blown away,” to draft a quarterback and trade Fields. It could very well happen.
What needs to be understood by all of these fans and fiction writers from other cities is that if everyone else in the league values that quarterback enough to offer their futures for the first pick, why wouldn’t the Bears value him, too?
Because they’re just stupid and don’t understand quarterbacks?
This is a city where there has always been poor quarterback play. Fields has been spectacular on occasion but mostly mediocre and bad in the fourth quarter of games. He has not even been a C.J. Stroud or he would have elevated a team before this point.
Even at his best, no one would say Fields can do everything Patrick Mahomes can.
“I don’t think there’s anything that I can’t do that he’s doing,” Williams said about Mahomes in that two-year-old comment being recirculated now to seem new.
If this is true or even partially true, and all of these other people outside of Chicago think enough of him to see the need to trade for him, then the message here is pretty clear.
If Williams really is like Patrick Mahomes as he himself suggested back in 2022, and if he’s as valuable as Payton and eveyrone else believe, then why wouldn’t the Bears want the great future quarterback rather than trade him for more picks?
They don’t even really need all the extra picks at this point, as they’ve already begun a climb to respectability, they have two first-round picks and there is plenty of cap cash.
People in other NFL cities should concentrate on trades with Washington or New England or some other team.
They should forget about fictional trades with a team that might finally have had the answer to age-old frustrating problems at the position fall squarely into its lap.
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