The Chicago Bears traded DJ Moore to the Buffalo Bills on Thursday for a 2026 second-round pick, and I want you to understand something before I say anything else: DJ Moore is a very good wide receiver. He caught 96 passes for 1,364 yards in 2023. He caught 79 for 1,101 in 2024. He was not the problem. He was, if anything, one of the few things that has worked in recent memory, which is exactly why they traded him. This is Chicago Bears football. When something works, you move it. When something doesn’t work, you move it. Everything moves. The plan is always that there is a plan.

General manager Ryan Poles said in a statement that the trade “positions the franchise for long-term success” and reflects the team’s “commitment to building sustainably through the draft.” I have been reading statements from Bears general managers for thirty years. Every Bears general manager I have ever observed has issued statements about long-term success and sustainable building, usually in the same week they did something that, in the short term, looked like a controlled demolition. This is not a criticism of Ryan Poles specifically. Ryan Poles seems like a reasonably competent person who is doing his level best in a franchise environment that has historically been hostile to level bests. I am simply noting that “long-term success” is the kind of phrase that sounds better before the long term arrives.

What the Bears will get for DJ Moore is a second-round pick, which is the sixtieth selection in the draft, which means it is a pick of moderate value in the context of an NFL Draft that contains 257 picks. This pick, together with the various other picks the Bears have accumulated, means Chicago is now entering the draft with a collection of capital that exceeds their actual roster. They have more future players than present players. At some point, the future has to start, and the present players have to win games, but that point is apparently not March 2026, because in March 2026 we are still building, still accumulating, still positioning for success that remains, for now, hypothetical.

The reason given for the trade — aside from the second-round pick — is that Moore’s $24 million-a-year contract had become expensive relative to his role on the offense, where the emergence of Luther Burden and Colston Loveland had pushed him to the third receiving option. Now, I am not a football strategist. I am a sixty-three-year-old man who watched the Bears from the Soldier Field upper deck for most of the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, and much of this decade. But I will say that having a $24 million problem is the kind of problem most teams would prefer to solve by making the wide receiver worth $24 million, rather than solving it by sending the wide receiver to Buffalo. Buffalo is now going to use DJ Moore to win football games. We are going to use the money we saved to do something else. I’m sure it will be great.

What the money will be used for is, at this writing, unclear. Reports suggest the Bears are interested in acquiring Las Vegas Raiders defensive end Maxx Crosby, who is a very good defensive player whose availability and price have not been confirmed. So the plan — and I’m reconstructing this from press releases and newspaper articles because nobody called me — is apparently to trade a wide receiver who catches passes for cash, and then use that cash to acquire an edge rusher who does not catch passes, in the hope that having an edge rusher improves the defense enough to make up for having fewer wide receivers. This might work. Football is complicated. I’ve been watching it for fifty years and it is still, periodically, surprising.

Meanwhile, Caleb Williams, the Bears’ franchise quarterback, now has one fewer target, a situation that the coaching staff has described as an “opportunity for growth” and that I would describe as “a thing that just happened.” Williams is 22 years old. He is extremely talented. He threw for 3,541 yards and 20 touchdowns last season. He is clearly capable of playing very good football when things are arranged properly around him. Arranging things properly around him has been the ongoing project, and Thursday’s trade is best understood as one more rearrangement in that ongoing project, which began in 2023 and continues into the foreseeable future, at which point they will either have arranged things properly or they will arrange something else.

I don’t want to be the old man who only complains. There is a version of this that works out. Maybe Maxx Crosby arrives and the defense becomes elite. Maybe Luther Burden has a season that makes everyone forget DJ Moore entirely. Maybe the second-round pick becomes something important. I’ve seen strange things happen in football. I’ve seen the 1985 Bears. I know what this franchise is capable of on its best days. I just want them to have some of those days before I’m too old to enjoy them properly. The long term is coming. I’m not getting any younger. Pick it up, please.