5 questions that will determine the Bears 2023 NFL Draft approach
By Evan Bruner
Chicago Bears Question No. 3: When should the Bears start going best player available?
There are two general approaches to a draft selection: Fill a positional need or take the best player available. Although these two deals can coincide, how the board falls in a given year is out of the team’s control.
It’s become a rule of thumb that teams that plan on being contenders for the upcoming season should prioritize positional needs, whereas rebuilding teams, such as Chicago, should go after the best overall players available.
However, these two strategies aren’t mutually exclusive, and teams often look to combine them into a hybrid approach that optimizes both positions of need while still accounting for the highest-rated players available.
The question isn’t if the Bears will deploy the best player available strategy in the draft as much as it’s when they decide to do so. Will they wait until day three? Day two? Is there a possibility they go that route from the jump?
One would think that for all the holes Chicago has, they are hardly in a position to be fixating on a particular group early on. With that said, an equally compelling case could be made for attacking the biggest holes on the roster from the jump to ensure we don’t have a repeat of 2022.
This factor could be the difference between drafting Paris Johnson Jr. at nine and taking his college teammate Jaxon Smith-Njigba. It’s easy to see why the answer to this question will be highly impactful to the Bears’ 2023 Draft haul.