Chicago Bears: Giving Ryan Pace credit where due

There are a lot of reasons for Ryan Pace to scrutiny. His blunders at quarterback have compounded with his desire to trade away extra draft picks to create holes in the roster that prevent them from taking a step forward. Still, Pace is just good enough at one area of being a GM that the Chicago Bears have made the playoffs the past two seasons, and are nowhere near seeing a top-five pick.

That is his ability to draft well. Dan Morse created an NFL draft value chart. More of how it works can be explained here. The gist is that each draft pick has a value for what it is expected to produce. While looking at NFL player value is not perfect, Morse used Pro Football Reference to compare the expected value of each pick to the actual value produced.

Below, you can see where the Chicago Bears rank in draft value over expectation dating back to 2001.

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2002 had Marc Colombo and Alex Brown while 2003 was Rex Grossman, Lance Briggs, and Charles Tillman. Still, you can see that 2004-2015 really hindered the roster. Of course, you can also see pretty clearly that from 2016 through the present day that the trajectory of the Bears drafts has changed significantly.

Of course, 2015 was the first draft for Ryan Pace and was the draft with Kevin White at the top. Getting so little out of a player with such high draft equity kills his rating. Beyond that, you are talking about consistency that Chicago has not seen in a very long time.

The quarterback decision was a huge mistake, but even Mitch Trubisky gave more for his draft slot than say, Josh Rosen. Beyond that, we know that Ryan Pace has hit in the mid to late round at a rate better than anyone else.

It is how he can survive getting decent production from his top picks while maintaining an above-average status as a drafting GM.

The issue with Pace is that while he is great at drafting, he knows how good he is. Check out this graph below. It looks at the snaps that teams get from rookies each year compared to the draft equity they spend to get those snaps. The Chicago Bears find themselves in the upper left.

This means the team is getting a lot of production out of their rookies, more than most teams. However, they are drafting the least amount of rookies. Teams spending much more on draft picks are getting much less. This is a positive for Pace, but because he knows how good he is, he is confident in every single pick and every evaluation.

When he trades up, it is with the confidence that he knows what he is doing and is getting a hit. The reality is that he is good at what he is doing, so he could still find a hit staying put. Then, he could draft multiple hits with the excess picks and the roster would not have the depth issue that it does.

When the Chicago Bears chose to bring back Ryan Pace, many were confused. However, George McCaskey likely sees that Pace can find talent better than most. He knows that Pace is the best he has had in a while. Pace has his issues and needs to learn from them. Still, if he does show growth as a GM, the Bears still can look smart in sticking with him.