To Edge or not to Edge?
To Safety first?
To “need” or to “fit”? Or to do neither and “best available” the whole thing and make all plans work from there? Because, recently, that seemed to be the Chef Poles Michelin-starred recipe.
The talk as it led up to Thursday’s Day 1 in the 2026 NFL Draft got louder and louder about Oregon’s Dillon Thieneman or Toledo’s Emmanuel McNeil-Warren being one of the dudes general manager Ryan Poles was going to pull the plug on when it came to the 25th pick. That one of them was going to be his guy, the one he trusts to be his “next best” find. The defensive equivalent of Luther Burden III, if you will. That kind of discovery.
But rumor had it that the Vikings had all eyes on Thieneman to be the sequel to their six-time All-Pro, 14-year safety Harrison Smith. Literally. Figuratively. Prototypically. Positionally. Racially. Draft-wise.
So the Bears had to look at other voids to fill with their first pick.
Other player’s names surfaced. Kadyn Proctor (OT), the wish. T.J. Parker (Edge), the gamble. Caleb Lomu (OT), the coulda. Dani Dennis-Sutton (Edge), the wild card. All parts of someone’s mock draft leading up to the Bears’ pick. Know that “mock” in many of these cases is short for “mockery.”
For the first time in four years, Chicago didn’t have a selection in the top 10 of the draft. This time they had a first-round pick that Marcus Spears or Mel Kiper Jr. didn’t talk a lot about. The last time the Bears drafted in the 20s of the first round was 2013, where at No. 20 they selected Kyle Long, who turned out to be a three-time Pro Bowl player while with the Bears.
Could it happen again?
History never really repeats itself, it just sequels. Sometimes in mysterious ways. Being on the clock that deep in the no man’s land of the first round can be either meaningless or meaningful. The Vikings flipped their own script on themselves. Drafting D-lineman Caleb Banks. So to make it meaning
