Jason La Canfora created a stir on Wednesday, when he sent out a tweet indicating that the Bears are leaning towards trading Justin Fields. But Bears fans who are excited to watch Fields develop as the team’s franchise quarterback probably shouldn’t be worried because of one tweet.
To start, we are in the middle of peak GM Lying Season. Ryan Poles has the most valuable asset in the NFL right now: the No. 1 pick in the draft. He’s going to do whatever he can to maximize the value of that pick, even if that means telling a few fibs here and there to drive up the price. In this case, Poles may want the Texans or Colts to believe that he’s interested in using the No. 1 overall pick to select a new quarterback in order to get those teams to pay more in a potential trade.
We’ve also gotta consider the source for the info here: Jason La Canfora. Normally I don’t support taking shots at reporters. It’s a tough job and sometimes people get things wrong. It happens. But La Canfora has a long history of reporting inaccurate information. So much so that there are well-documented forums dedicated to all the times he’s been wrong. Bears fans in particular may remember several La Canfora reports that never came to fruition.
Of course the very next day, Fangio signed on with the Bears.
Once again, the Bears proved La Canfora wrong and Gase signed with the Bears three days after this tweet.
Those examples are certainly on the older side, since they happened eight years ago, but La Canfora has missed more recently, too.
This one was a two-fer, since the Bears didn’t fire Matt Nagy after the 2020 season, nor was there any indication that there were significant talks between the Bears and Fitzgerald when the team did open up its coaching search in 2022.
Finally, La Canfora asserted that the Bears reached out to Trace Armstrong in 2021 to take over football operations for the Bears, nearly one year before Ted Phillips announced his plans to retire. Armstrong strongly denied the report, and no such restructuring of the Bears front office happened. The Bears hired Kevin Warren to be their next president/CEO in January, and kept their organizational hierarchy the same as it had been under Phillips.
NFL
CBS replaced La Canfora as their lead NFL Insider last year, and elevated Jonathan Jones to take his place.
The NFL draft begins Apr. 27, and until then there will be plenty more smoke and mirrors about every team’s intentions.