Look, I don’t want to make the entire offseason about Mike Tanier, and I also don’t want to just spend all my time criticizing the Chicago Bears, who I really and truly believe are now extremely competently run, well-coached, and true contenders.
HOWEVER. There were a bunch of factual errors in Mike’s last big thing about the Packers and when I start to see factual errors in a piece, I start to wonder if its basic premise is even true — in this case, that the Packers have lost a bunch of guys in free agency that they failed to replace adequately, when compared to the rest of the league.
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As I was just perusing the Bears’ statistics, I noticed the following:
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They REALLY relied on turnovers on defense last year to an absurd extent;
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That’s likely to regress to the mean pretty hard;
I found it hard to believe that the Bears have lost fewer players/snaps/value than the Packers. It seemed impossible. Kevin Byard, who led the team with 7 picks, is a Patriot. Nahshon Wright (5 picks) is a Jet. Linebacker Tremaine Edmunds (4 picks) is a Giant. CJ Gardner-Johnson (2 picks) is a Bill. And Jaquan Brisker, who tied with a few other Bears at one interception, but is conveniently listed next on their leaderboard at PFR, is a Steeler. That’s a LOT of people with a lot of production!
And so, I decided to take a deeper look into who lost more, and it’s the Bears — and it’s not close. This is a bit cludgy, so bear (ha!) with me. I took everyone who played a snap for the Packers and Bears last year, charted out their snaps and their “Approximate Value” (AV is a terrible but simple approximation of player value that’s mostly just based on volume, but since we’re comparing players across all positions, it’s what we’ve got), and then charted out who was no longer with the team.
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The Bears saw 11,481 snaps and 73 AV walk out the door. Six players with at least 800 snaps are gone. 11 players with at least 500 snaps are gone. The Packers, meanwhile, saw 7,693 snaps depart for presumably warmer pastures; for those counting, that is 3,788 fewer snaps lost than the Bears. Green Bay also lost 57 AV, or 16 fewer than the Bears. The top five Packers lost via snap count were Rasheed Walker (1064), Quay Walker (958), Romeo Doubs (818), Rashan Gary (661) and Colby Wooden (658).
The Bears’ top five are the retired Drew Dalman (1169), Jaquan Brisker (1162), Kevin Byard (1072), Nahshon Wright (1059), and DJ Moore (981). That’s a lot of guys with 1,000-ish snaps!
Ah! But! The Bears surely ADDED more in free agency than the Packers, and we all know the best way to replace outgoing players is to pay full market value to as many people as possible. And yes, they did. Not counting draft picks and UDFAs, the Bears added nine people via free agency or trade. Those players (Cameron Lewis, Devin Bush, Neville Gallimore, Jack Sanborn, Kentavius Street, Kalif Raymond, Garrett Bradbury, Coby Bryant, and James Lynch), played a combined 5,543 snaps last year, and contributed a combined 39 AV. Will Devin Bush put up 10 AV and two pick sixes like he did last year after going five straight years without any picks? Who’s to say? But this means on net, subtracting the incoming FAs and trades from the outgoing, the Bears lost 5938 snaps and 34 AV.
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The Packers have added 5 players including Skyy Moore, Benjamin St-Juste, Zaire Franklin, Tyrod Taylor, and Javon Hargrave. I do want to call out Taylor specifically as QBs could muck this up a bit, but the Packers do tend to see more work from their backup than you would like, and so I think it’s at least somewhat fair to count his 251 snaps from last season, especially as we are offsetting Malik Willis’ departure. The Packers added 2,893 snaps and 22 AV between the five, meaning that on net, the Packers lost 4,800 snaps (which is 1,138 fewer than Chicago) and 35 AV (which is one more than Chicago, but do remember that AV is kind of stupid).
In a March 23rd post on NFC free agent movement to date, Tanier gave an almost total pass to the Bears:
“The Bears lost more than they would have liked in the last few weeks, especially factoring in center Drew Dalman’s retirement. Garrett Bradbury is a downgrade from Dalman, and the departures (Kevin Byard, Nahshon Wright, Jaquan Brisker, C.J. Gardner-Johnson) outweigh the arrivals (Coby Bryant, Cameron Lewis) in the secondary.
The Bears moved DJ Moore on their own terms, but he wasn’t chopped liver, while incoming receiver Kalif Raymond is essentially a return man.
Overall, however, the Bears are an on-the-rise team that wasn’t pillaged too badly and acquired some draft capital for their efforts. And just wait until you see what happened to the rest of the NFC North!”
I’m not really in the mood to run the numbers for the Vikings and Lions (though the Vikings have been in major cost-cutting mode), but I think you get the idea. The notion that the Packers have hemorrhaged some massive amount of talent while the Bears are calmly and confidently on the upswing is just factually incorrect. The Bears definitely lost more players, and more impactful players. They were probably somewhat justified in their free agent moves as a result, but they didn’t even recover to Packer levels in the process. And if you didn’t do all of the work that I just did, you’d probably never know it.
We’ll save some of the other Bears’ headwinds for another time, though there are plenty of them. For now, just note that anyone claiming the Packers have had some disastrous offseason probably lacked rigor in their analysis.
