The Patriots liked former Ohio State running back TreVeyon Henderson enough that they drafted him with the No. 38 pick and in the process turned down trade offers from two other teams.
In the first episode of the Patriots’ Forged in Foxboro video series, cameras inside the draft room showed the offers the Patriots were getting while on the clock at No. 38.
The Bears, who owned the 39th pick, offered a seventh-round pick if the Patriots would move down one spot. The Patriots believed the Bears were going to take Henderson themselves if they made the trade, so they declined the offer.
The Texans also tried to get the 38th pick, offering the Patriots a package of three picks in a swap: The No. 58 and No. 79 picks in the 2025 draft as well as a third-round pick in 2026. Again, the Patriots declined.
Those were solid offers the Patriots turned down, but they show how much New England liked Henderson. They see him having a big role in their offense, and they were willing to turn down extra picks to ensure they got him.
When the 2025 NFL schedule came out, Bears coach Ben Johnson found out that his team gets its bye in Week Five, the earliest bye week this year. And Johnson is pleased about that.
Johnson said on The Herd that assessing his team for a month and then getting a week for the coaches to evaluate what they need to work on should be ideal for a first-year staff.
“I actually like where that bye week is, because it usually takes about four weeks into the season to find out who you are as a team, what you do well, what you don’t do well, and that’s a good time so we can reflect on that as a coaching staff so we can hone in on what we want to be for the remaining three-quarters of the season,” Johnson said.
Johnson said he knows it will take time for his team, with a new head coach, new assistants and a lot of new players, to be on the same page.
“It can take up to half the season before they really start to mesh and come together,” Johnson said.
Some coaches prefer a later bye week because they like to give their players some extra rest heading into a playoff run. But Johnson thinks the extra time off early in the season gives the Bears a better chance of being in the playoff hunt at the end of the season.
The Bears are once again shifting their focus for where they’d like to build their next stadium.
According to a new report from the Chicago Tribune, the franchise is once again planning to build a stadium complex in Arlington Heights after a project at the current downtown site of Soldier Field hasn’t been able to get off the ground.
“Over the last few months, we have made significant progress with the leaders in Arlington Heights, and look forward to continuing to work with state and local leaders on making a transformative economic development project for the region a reality,” the Bears said in a Friday statement, via the Chicago Tribune.
The report notes the Bears are not planning to seek state funding for the stadium project, but the club would nevertheless need “megaproject” legislation. That would allow the club to negotiate with local governments over property tax bills.
The Bears shifting their focus back to Arlington Heights had partially been signaled by team president and CEO Kevin Warren sending a letter to new Chicago Park District Superintendent Carlos Ramirez-Rosa regarding the condition of Soldier Field that asked for documents to “provide an overview of maintenance and capital spending.”
Warren has said multiple times that the team would like to get “shovels in the ground” on a new stadium in 2025. We’ll see if that now ends up happening in Arlington Heights sometime this year.
The ESPN.com item regarding quarterback Caleb Williams generated the biggest headlines regarding his interest in avoiding the Bears. There’s another headline lurking in one of the later paragraphs of the article regarding his experience with the Bears in 2024.
Here’s the relevant paragraph from the story, derived from Seth Wickersham’s upcoming book, American Kings: A Biography of the Quarterback: “At times, Williams said he would watch film alone, with no instruction or guidance from the coaches. ‘No one tells me what to watch,’ Caleb Williams told his dad. ‘I just turn it on.’”
That’s a damning claim. It underscores the dysfunction the Bears have endured for years — and it raises questions about whether new coach Ben Johnson will be able to truly change things in Chicago.
Obviously, Johnson has proven his chops as an offensive mastermind. Williams will be in far better hands than he was a year ago. If nothing else, he’ll know how to watch film.
Still, the Bears have been too blah for too long to just assume everything wil be changed overnight. The same group that hired Johnson thought it would be prudent a year earlier to keep Matt Eberflus and to make Shane Waldron the offensive coordinator (and not, say, Kliff Kingsbury, who did a pretty good job with Jayden Daniels in D.C.).
We’re giving the Bears the benefit of the doubt. We’ll assume the Chico’s Bail Bonds days are over. But that one small piece of Thursday’s ESPN article serves as a reminder that dysfunctional teams do dysfunctional things — and that the dysfunction in Chicago has run far deeper than the pizza pans.
The NFL says there is no glitch. Even if there’s still a glitch.
Earlier today, we pointed out that the official NFL.com schedule says that the two games announced for Saturday, December 20 (Eagles-Commanders and Packers-Bears) will actually be played on Friday, December 19. Each of the four teams’ websites apply neither a time nor a date to the games.
NFL.com has since changed its Week 16 slate. Instead of moving the games to Saturday, December 20, however, the schedule now has the two games under this heading: “Games Not Yet Scheduled.” With no date identified.
That said, the league says the games will be played on Saturday. And we’ll regard that as conclusive.
Still, the glitch lingers. It all makes us wonder whether, at some point, the league was considering moving a pair of traditional Saturday games to Friday, given the conflict with three college football playoff games.
