NFL Draft 2026: Chicago Bears fill needs but miss chance for impact: Telander

CHICAGO - I have thoughts about the recently-ended 2026 NFL Draft, and particularly the Chicago Bears’ role in it.

First off, I must say I am astounded at the popularity of what is essentially an offseason crapshoot wherein young athletes in street clothes walk across a stage and weep while wearing various baseball caps.

League commissioner Roger Goodell said there were 320,000 people at the Pittsburgh event on opening night, and who can doubt the man who made $64 million last season. A total of 805,000 people attended the three-day circus, which is the population of San Francisco.

According to ESPN, another 13.2 million people watched the first round on TV. Bottom line: Americans love the NFL. Even when there’s no game.

I said the draft is a crapshoot, and I believe it. Nobody knows for sure how good any of the chosen players will be. We can make really good guesses, but we can be wrong. Remember Mitch Trubisky? Wide receiver Kevin White? And those are just the Bears’ misses. All 32 teams have had their duds.

The main lock in the draft appears to be 2025 Heisman Trophy winner and first pick, Fernando Mendoza. The 6-foot-5, 225-pound quarterback led Indiana to its first ever college football national championship in January. He appears to be headed for greatness. But he got picked by the Las Vegas Raiders, and they haven’t won a playoff game in 23 years. There’s something about that club.

Indeed, the Raiders took quarterback JaMarcus Russell with the first pick in the 2007 draft, and he’s right up there with the biggest busts in draft history. He started 25 games, lost 18, and was out of the league.

The Raiders also drafted quarterback Todd Marinovich in the first round back in 1991. Marijuanavich, as he was dubbed, started eight games in two years, won three, and his drug-addled NFL career was over.

So anything can happen. The NFL Combine and college stats can only tell you so much.

And the extremes always captivate us. How about the Los Angeles Chargers fourth round pick of Travis Burke, an offensive tackle who goes 6-foot-9, 325 pounds?

And there were many draftees who ran sub-4.40 forties at the combine, with three going below 4.30, including wide receivers Lorenzo Styles Jr. from Ohio State and Zavion Thomas from LSU, both with 4.28s.

Then there was human blur, wide receiver Brenen Thompson, with a 4.26. He also was taken by the Chargers, completing their circus on turf.

Is wideout Carnell Tate, taken fourth overall by the Tennessee Titans that much better than Thompson? Like, millions of dollars better? Tate ran a mediocre 4.53 forty. But he’s 6-foot-2 ¼ to Thompson’s 5-foot-9. Tate weighs 192 pounds, while Thompson’s a wisp at 165 pounds. But Thompson hit 24 mph in his forty. That’s jack rabbit speed. It’ll take time, maybe years, to see how the dust settles.

Which brings us to the Bears. Their first pick, Oregon safety Dillon Thieneman, at No. 25, seems like a pretty solid choice. The Bears need safeties and Thieneman has the speed, size, and grit to be a solid one for many years.

But the draft is also about what you didn’t get, and the Bears desperately need help on the defensive line, and they passed on any star edge rushers, the guys who get the quarterback. Safeties are nice, but they come into effect too often when somebody’s already made it past a weak defensive line.

The loss of All-Pro free safety Kevin Byard and strong safety Jaquan Brisker had to be addressed, but so too does the fact the Bears 35 sacks in 2025 ranked them tied with three other teams for 22nd in the league. They were 33 sacks behind the league-leading Denver Broncos.

The other Bears’ picks—Iowa center Logan Jones to help fill the spot abruptly vacated by Drew Dalman, Stanford tight end Sam Roush as a backup in coach Ben Johnson’s tight end-happy offense, Texas cornerback Malik Muhammad, Arizona State linebacker Keyshaun Elliott, defensive tackle Jordan van den Berg--from Georgia Tech by way of South Africa—can all help.

But is there any excitement there, any pizazz? Not really. Maybe that guy we mentioned earlier—wide receiver Thomas, he of the blazing 4.28 speed, taken in the third round by the Bears—will be a breakout star. Maybe he’ll just be a stud return man. Maybe he’ll flame out fast, like Kevin White. Nobody knows.

USA Today gave the Bears a "C" for their draft, summing it up with the descriptive comment, "Meh."

It wasn’t a bad draft. It sure wasn’t a great draft. Sometimes you have to play with what you got, with what remains from before.

Hope might be the Bears biggest draft pick of all.

Dig deeper:

Want more? Read some of Rick Telander’s recent columns for Fox 32:

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