(670 The Score) Now is it any clearer how far away the Bears are from competing for a championship?
What about how bereft and barren their roster was, how few genuinely talented players are here or how all of Ryan Pace's secretive dealings and splashy moves were just ongoing cover for a desperate incompetence that left the franchise in dead-cap hell without even one single playoff win to show for it?
Take a good look. This is life at the bottom of the NFL, where all the usual concerns of real teams -- like who's playing at what spot next year, for example, or how they can best support the development of a quarterback prospect -- are less immediately important than just finding players who aren't awful or may not be.
Whatever first-year general manager Ryan Poles may have told chairman George McCaskey that was enough to land him the job, the approach to his first draft evinced the kind of clear-eyed awareness of somebody who watches something more than whatever Bears games have been for too long.
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In his first NFL Draft in charge of the Bears, Poles took some upside players and some more ready-made contributors, not so much with concern for what we may have identified as specific positional needs but seemingly knowing that it doesn't matter at this point. You know what positions the Bears need to address? Absolutely all of them.
And don't start giving me names. It only makes everything sound worse.
Roquan Smith is nice, but he's an inside linebacker. Darnell Mooney has been productive enough, but good teams have two of him and another receiver who's easily better. Robert Quinn is an ill-fitting asset who must be traded as soon as reasonably possible, David Montgomery is a guy, Jaylon Johnson is among those who might be at some point and Cole Kmet has all the athletic suddenness of a desk lamp. In truth, the only place where the Bears don't have a clear and objective need for an upgrade right now is quarterback, and even that dynamic has been widely misunderstood.
Justin Fields has done nothing to deserve this, but he's in an unfortunate position as Pace's last gasp, merely a victim of bad timing and a coach who either didn't seem to care about him or had no idea how to do so properly. Those of us who still think highly of Fields -- and make no mistake that I am among them -- can also be aware of the reality of a larger and weighty context that means he'll have to prove himself without any coddling or custom-fitting of the Bears to him at this point. Not this year.
If he's great, he can go ahead and be great in a new system among this collection of bargain-basement veteran free agents on one-year tryout deals, some motivated young overachievers and whatever had been left over. The real quarterbacks make it clear one way or another that their mere presence is worth some wins on its own. If and when the ship starts to turn because of Fields, we'll all know it when we see it, and we just haven't yet unless we have been trying way too damn hard to see what we want to see.
And the fact that Poles kept trading down for more selections was also a clear admission that this is an open casting call for anybody who wants to be part of what's next, and not what was. It also means he believes the differences after the third round or so in this draft were insignificant enough to value proprietary rights and symbolic commitments over those now made to what will be a long list of undrafted free agents.
So feel free to debate the individual names and skills all you want, who might fit where and when or what one choice over another says about anybody else.
I'll be satisfied enough looking up from here, yet again hoping against hope that this time the hole at least doesn't get any deeper.
Dan Bernstein is the co-host of the Bernstein & Rahimi Show on middays from 9 a.m. until noon on 670 The Score. You can follow him on Twitter @Dan_Bernstein.