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Chicago Bears Q&A: Which rookie will make the biggest jump? What’s a projected win total? Will DJ Moore average 10 targets a game?

Brad Biggs, Chicago Tribune
·12 min read

There are a lot of questions surrounding the young Chicago Bears players as the regular season gets underway. Which rookie will take the biggest jump? Which sophomores will stand out? And why not just turn backup quarterback Nathan Peterman into a coach?

Brad Biggs answers your Bears questions in preparation for Sunday’s Week 1 matchup against the Green Bay Packers.

Which rookie from this year’s draft class will take the biggest jump? — @just_acy

It’s a little hard to say because we’re only speculating where the floor of each player is right now. We think we have a good idea but we’ve yet to see them in action. If you were ranking them in terms of most likely, I’m guessing the list begins with cornerback Tyrique Stevenson, a second-round pick, or right tackle Darnell Wright, the team’s first-round pick. The Bears should be optimistic both players have successful starts to their careers.

For general manager Ryan Poles to get the most bang for his buck — for this draft class to make a big impact this season — I think the team needs to see one of the defensive tackles really emerge as a force. Gervon Dexter, selected in Round 2, and third-round pick Zacch Pickens should begin the season in the rotation on the line. There simply isn’t a lot of competition for playing time at the position after veterans Justin Jones and Andrew Billings. Playing time for the rookies will largely be based on performance. The better they play, the more snaps they’re going to get.

The Bears have totally rebuilt the front of their defense — only two of the seven starters from the front seven in Week 1 a year ago are starters in the league going into Week 1 (Jones and Baltimore Ravens linebacker Roquan Smith) — and in this transition, they really need to find future building blocks at defensive tackle. That’s why I would cite Dexter and/or Pickens here.

Out of everyone entering year their second year in the NFL, who will have the biggest jump? — @officialjaychi

You and Acy must have gotten together to craft these questions. There are a lot of different directions you could go here.

Defensive end Dominique Robinson has to be better in his second season, right? He made a splash in the season-opening victory over the San Francisco 49ers with 1 1/2 sacks but it was a slog the rest of the way for him. Left tackle Braxton Jones was impressive last season, emerging as a 17-game starter. You don’t see a lot of Day 3 picks step into a starting role on an offensive line right away and it’s even more unusual to see a left tackle taken that late in the draft who doesn’t require extensive seasoning to be prepared. Jones should be better in 2023, no doubt.

I’d say the biggest jump will come from either Jones or cornerback Kyler Gordon, who had an impressive training camp as the slot cornerback and looks to be operating with a lot more confidence. Gordon’s traits — he moves really well at 6-foot, 200 pounds — and physical nature provide defensive coordinator Alan Williams with a wealth of options. I think Gordon could be pretty good this season and the secondary, as a whole, will be the strength of the defense.

Now that we’ve seen training camp and the preseason, what do you project a win total to be for the Bears? For me, seven seems about right and I do think they’ll be better, but I still have concerns about depth at a couple of key positions and I’m not entirely convinced Justin Fields makes a big leap. I hope I’m proven wrong. Your thoughts? — Chris M., Hermosa Beach, Calif.

There’s a lot going on here with this question. For the Bears to exceed popular expectations this season — that they will be somewhere in the neighborhood of .500 — Fields will have to raise his performance and that is why the moves the team made on offense this offseason are critical. It’s going to be one of the younger rosters in the league and the Bears are going to have to learn how to win. That might seem like an abstract statement but it’s really true, especially for the players — just more than 50% of the roster — who were here for a 3-14 campaign as the Bears began an arduous rebuilding process. You never know exactly how a schedule will play out. It looked like the Bears had a relatively easy slate a year ago and it turned into a gauntlet. The Bears have only five games against opponents that finished in the top half of the NFL in points allowed a year ago. There are six games (counting the Green Bay Packers twice) against opponents with a starting quarterback that has made four or fewer career starts entering this season (this assumes Kyler Murray doesn’t return at the end of the season for the Arizona Cardinals):

Four of those six games will be played at Soldier Field. With improvements that have been made to the offense, with a lot of new personnel on defense and with this schedule, there is a path to nine or 10 wins if the Bears play better in crunch time than they did in 2022. If the schedule proves to be a little more challenging than expected and if some of the upgrades don’t click for the Bears, that number could be reduced by a handful of games and they could wind up somewhere between six and eight wins. Fortunately, real games are right around the corner.

If DJ Moore does not get 10 or so targets in Week 1, I’ll be disappointed. Your thoughts? — @rradulski

I like the way you are thinking here. The more the Bears can get the ball to their best playmaker, the better they should be offensively. Moore had 10 or more targets in 27 of 73 starts as a member of the Carolina Panthers. Justin Fields has targeted a wide receiver 10-plus times only once in his career and it involved Darnell Mooney in the Oct. 13 loss to the Washington Commanders last season (12 targets, seven receptions, 68 yards).

Mooney had 16 targets in the Nov. 2, 2021, loss to the Baltimore Ravens but Fields left that game in the first half with an injury and attempted only 11 passes, replaced by Andy Dalton. The Bears have five other instances of skill position players being targeted 10 or more times over the last two seasons. Mooney has three other games that reach your magic number, wide receiver Allen Robinson had one as did tight end Cole Kmet. Those all came in starts by Andy Dalton.

This is going to come down to passing volume, which will be dictated by game flow and offensive coordinator Luke Getsy’s strategy. The Bears traveled back in time with their offense last season. They had 377 pass attempts — 22.17 per game. That is the lowest figure in the league since the 1990 Los Angeles Raiders averaged 21.0 with Jay Schroeder at the helm and Marcus Allen and Bo Jackson in the backfield for a 12-4 division winner. Excluding the strike season of 1982, you have to go back to the 1978 Bears for another team that averaged less than 22.17 passes per game. Bob Avellini and Mike Phipps were the starters that season when the offense averaged 22 attempts per game. In the era of modern football, the 2022 Bears offense was really an anomaly. There are myriad reasons for the passing volume being so low, one of them being Fields’ playmaking ability with his legs, but this offense was truly an outlier.

Moore is going to have games where he’s fed the ball a lot but if the Bears remain a run-heavy offense (which would not surprise me), it probably will not be targets galore for Moore every week. I would point out that 10 is a high number to average. Over the last two seasons (17-game schedule) only four receivers have had 170 or more targets — Justin Jefferson, Davante Adams and Tyreek Hill in 2022 and Cooper Kupp in 2021.

Going into this season, how many blue players (rates in the top 10 at his position in the league) do the Bears currently have on their roster? — @canuckboy670am

Going into the season, the number probably isn’t where you would hope it is. The key for the Bears — and the future — will be what the roster looks like in terms of having ascending players when the season ends. With so many young players at nearly every position, the Bears will have some players emerge. Some will fade but there is hope that it will be arrow up at a lot of places.

I contacted a pro personnel scout with another team who has done plenty of work on the Bears over the past couple of seasons and asked him to call up the depth chart before presenting him with your question.

“Offensively, there are none,” he said. “To me, DJ Moore is a high red (the level under blue). I think you would say Cole Kmet is a red. The offensive line, I don’t see any blue there. The quarterback is not blue and neither are the runners.

“On defense, the middle linebacker is. Tremaine Edmunds is a blue so there is one. No blue corners although Jaylon Johnson can be a red. He’s definitely not a blue. Yannick Ngakoue is not blue anymore. He’s red. Eddie Jackson, he’s not a blue. He misses tackles and he’s had durability problems. Blues for me have to be available. That’s been an issue with Johnson too. He hasn’t gotten his hands on the ball as much lately to turn it over (four interceptions in the last three seasons, all in 2022, after 10 interceptions in his first three seasons). You have to be able to turn it over, you have to be an open-field tackler and you have to be available to be a blue safety.”

The upside for the Bears, though, is it is a young roster and there is a lot of young talent that could emerge as building blocks for the future, guys who can change colors the way personnel folks like to see. Quarterback Justin Fields, safety Jaquan Brisker, offensive tackles Braxton Jones and Darnell Wright, cornerback Tyrique Stevenson and even Moore and Kmet are players who could take steps forward. That is just a sampling of some of the young players who could emerge at Halas Hall.

The Bears seem to be enamored with Nathan Peterman’s contributions in the quarterback room. Why don’t they hire him as a coach and sign a quarterback who could contribute more on the football field than Peterman? — Dave B., Countryside

I think you need to get a handle on the QB2 landscape around the league. It’s not very pretty when you’re looking at options No. 33 through No. 64 across the NFL. You’ve got a lot of recycled starters like Andy Dalton, Marcus Mariota, Jameis Winston, Blaine Gabbert, Sam Darnold, Mitch Trubisky, Teddy Bridgewater and such/, and generally speaking, you’ve got to pay a little more for that experience. After the cast of former starters, there are a lot of inexperienced players or younger guys along the lines of Tyson Bagent. The Bears have a quarterbacks coach in Andrew Janocko whom they hold in high regard. I don’t know that there is a free-agent quarterback on the street right now that would move the needle in the event something happens to Justin Fields.

How are the Bears going to fix the middle of the offensive line? It looks terrible. Doesn’t that put more pressure on the tackles, who have limited experience? — @leroyal27654846

I don’t think the Bears’ issue from guard to guard necessarily puts more pressure on the tackles. Certainly the hope is it doesn’t lead to more pressure on Justin Fields. If Nate Davis is the player the Bears have paid him to be (he signed a $30 million, three-year contract), they should be pretty good at right guard. I think everyone is comfortable with Cody Whitehair at left guard even with him on the back nine of his career entering his eighth season. The question mark, while Teven Jenkins is out with a right leg injury, is at center, where my best guess is Lucas Patrick starts Sunday against the Green Bay Packers. It’s not ideal to have moving parts on the line and have guys like Davis and Patrick, who did not participate in the preseason, but it is what it is.

GM Ryan Poles traded for veteran Dan Feeney before roster cuts, adding a guy who has ample experience starting at guard and center. I think the Bears prioritized getting a swing player for the interior who they will be comfortable with, especially considering Patrick has had durability concerns. It would be more alarming to me if the team hadn’t brought in a guy like Feeney. This is something to keep an eye on but I wouldn’t classify it as “terrible” before they have played a regular-season game. Ultimately, the biggest question marks for the line center on the growth and development of the tackles Braxton Jones and Darnell Wright. That’s what is paramount in the big picture.