Ryan Pace doesn’t exactly have a good track record with the word “conviction” when it comes to quarterback decisions.
Pace described Mike Glennon as “ a guy that I had a lot of conviction on for a long time,” after guaranteeing him $18.5 million in March of 2017. A month and a half later, the same word was used over and over to explain the Bears' trade up to draft Mitch Trubisky.
“As an organization, we had conviction on this quarterback and his special attributes,” Pace said, “and we did what we had to do to get him.”
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It’s not just that Pace had conviction in Glennon (who was benched after four games) and Trubisky (who had the NFL’s worst yards per attempt average in 2019). It’s what that conviction led the Bears to do.
The Bears had to have Glennon so bad they gave him a contract which quickly became a punchline. And the Bears couldn’t settle for the other quarterbacks in 2017’s draft class, so Pace moved up from No. 3 to No. 2 to make sure he got him.
In an alternate universe, the Bears signed Colin Kaepernick or Case Keenum (or Foles himself!) and drafted Patrick Mahomes or DeShaun Watson in 2017.
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But let’s bring this back to 2020. Colleague Adam Hoge, on the Hoge & Jahns Podcast, asked Pace if he considered signing Cam Newton – who wound up with the Patriots on a cheap one-year deal – in the broader context of this year’s bumper crop of available quarterbacks.
“This past free agency, this past offseason there were a lot of different options at quarterback and we explored all of those, of course we evaluated all of those,” Pace said. “I think when you talk about our coaches and our scouts – our coaches alone, you think about the quarterback evaluators we have in our building with coach (Matt) Nagy and Bill Lazor and (John DiFilippo), (Dave) Ragone — there’s a lot of experience at that position in our building and I feel like we were really thorough m with the process and we went through all of them.
“I can just speak to Nick Foles and obviously there’s a reason why we went after him, there’s a reason why we made that trade. There’s a lot of background with him. His experience, his success that he’s had, his fit to our team and our offense, it works out about that addition, it works out about that competition.”
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It wasn’t just Pace and his scouts who had conviction on Foles. It was Nagy (who worked with him in Kansas City), DiFilippo (who worked with him in Philadelphia and Jacksonville) and Lazor (who worked with him in Philadelphia).
If you’re looking for a reason to hope the Foles trade will work out better than the Glennon signing or the Trubisky pick, it’s those three guys. Nagy, DiFilippo and Lazor weren’t here in 2017; Ragone was but, per the Chicago Tribune’s exceptional report on the Trubisky pick from last year, preferred Watson.
Nobody on the Bears' staff had worked with Glennon before in 2017, let alone Trubisky. Glennon threw 11 passes the year before signing in Chicago. The same kind of scouting miss feels unlikely in 2020 with so many coaches on staff who know Foles so well.
“We had a complete picture on Foles beyond what we were seeing on tape,” Pace said on the Hoge & Jahns Podcast. “I think that’s extremely valuable. It was huge for us as we went through it. For all those different coaches to all independently have that conviction on him along with our scouts, just made it easy to make that decision when there’s just conviction from the scouts and the coaches together. That’s how it was with Nick.”
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Of course, this year's conviction led the Bears to trade a 2020 fourth-round pick to the Jaguars and guarantee Foles $24 million just to get him to Chicago. It’s fair to wonder who the Bears were bidding against – a familiar question asked in 2017 with the Glennon and Trubisky acquisitions – especially as guys like Newton, Andy Dalton and Jameis Winston were signed at bargain prices.
But if the Bears’ conviction actually procudes good, consistent quarterback play in Foles, it won’t matter what was traded away or how much money was guaranteed. Conviction equaling results didn’t happen with Glennon and hasn’t happened with Trubisky, but maybe, just maybe, with Nagy and other well-regarded quarterback minds here, it will with Foles.