Chicago Bears: The good and the bad of Ryan Pace’s draft pick history

Since joining the Chicago Bears in 2015, Ryan Pace hasn’t built up the most favorable reputation. But when you take a closer look, he hasn’t actually done as bad of a job as people think.

When you look at what Ryan Pace has established since becoming the General Manager for the Chicago Bears, you’d think he would be one of the more beloved GMs in the league. He took a team that was becoming a perennial loser and turned them into a threat in one of the toughest conferences in the NFL. Nobody can look at his resume and say that he’s done a bad job, but somehow he’s still one of the most hated men of his position.

So if he brought this team back into the spotlight, what has he done to upset the Bears fanbase so much? Before we get into that, I’m also going to dabble in what he’s done right. After all, the Bears have built up an extremely strong defense and are likely an offense away from being a Super Bowl contender.

On paper, he hasn’t done a bad job by any stretch of the imagination. This Bears organization is in an objectively better place than it was before he arrived; Chicago is an annual playoff contender and easily a top-5 defense in the league. Some of the biggest rising stars in the league now hail from Chicago including Tarik Cohen, Eddie Jackson, and Khalil Mack.

But then you notice that there is another much larger piece of paper next to this one. On this paper, you see Pace’s draft history as well as some early signings that he made. As any general manager does, he has blemishes. But it isn’t all bad, and for the sake of positivity, we’ll start out on the happier side of things.