I have been watching the Chicago Bears conduct an NFL offseason for a long time. Long enough that I have developed something that a therapist might call a coping mechanism and that I call a philosophy: when the Bears do something that does not make obvious sense, I wait. I wait because usually, eventually, an explanation arrives. Sometimes the explanation is good. Sometimes the explanation is “we thought this would work and it didn’t.” Either way, the explanation comes. This year I have been waiting since Thursday, when the Bears sent DJ Moore to Buffalo, and now it is Tuesday, and the explanation they’ve offered is that they spent seventy million dollars on two defensive players they did not have last week. I am going to be honest with you: I am still waiting.

Here is what happened. On Friday, the Bears signed safety Coby Bryant to a three-year, $40 million contract. On Saturday, they signed linebacker Devin Bush to a three-year, $30 million deal. They re-signed backup quarterback Case Keenum, which I will address in a moment. The Bears now have — and I want to be precise here — a safety, a linebacker, a backup quarterback, and a wide receiver corps consisting of Luther Burden (age 21, seven career NFL games), Colston Loveland (tight end, technically, which I mention only because the offense seems to be counting him as a receiver), and the ghost of DJ Moore’s $24 million contract, which was apparently too expensive but which was also, as I noted in this column last week, a functioning NFL receiver.

I understand the theory. I do. The theory is that the Bears’ defense was a problem last season — they were 23rd in points allowed — and that fixing the defense will make the whole enterprise work better. This is a reasonable theory. Defense matters. Coby Bryant was good in Seattle. Devin Bush was good before his knee. The numbers Ryan Poles paid for them are aggressive but not insane by the standards of a league that paid a kicker $25 million in 2024. I understand the theory. What I do not entirely understand is how the theory connects to the fact that Caleb Williams, who is 22 years old and genuinely talented, now has two fewer routes to throw to than he did in January. The defense has been improved. The offense has been worsened. The net effect on winning football games — which is, as I understand it, the goal — is not obvious to me, and I have been watching football for fifty years.

The Case Keenum re-signing I will address briefly. Case Keenum is 38. He is a competent backup quarterback who has started games for six different NFL teams with mixed results that I will characterize charitably as “the results you’d expect from a backup quarterback starting games.” Signing Case Keenum is the Bears saying: we know Caleb Williams is our quarterback, but if Caleb Williams gets hurt, we would like to have a person available who can hand the ball to a running back and fall down correctly. I have no objection to this. It is prudent. It is the least interesting decision the Bears have made this month, and for that reason I find it the most comforting.

I called my friend Pete Mazurski — he’s been a Bears season ticket holder since 1979, sits in section 144, brings the same blanket every year — to get his take on the defensive spending. Pete said: “Tom, I’m going to be honest with you. I stopped trying to understand the offseason in 2014. I just watch the games now and see if they won. I feel much better.” I told him I thought that was a reasonable approach. He asked what I thought they’d do about the wide receiver situation. I said I didn’t know. He said he didn’t know either. He said “probably they’ll draft one in the second round, trade the pick to someone, then sign a guy in August who nobody’s heard of.” He said this without bitterness. He said it the way you say true things about institutions you have long since made your peace with.

The draft, which arrives in April, is where the remaining threads presumably get connected. The Bears now hold draft picks that include, among others, two second-rounders — one of which arrived Thursday from Buffalo — and the kind of mid-round depth that general managers describe as “a real asset” when they are about to use it to solve a problem that the previous moves created. It is possible that one of those picks is a wide receiver. It is possible that a wide receiver who falls to the middle of the second round is exactly what this offense needs. I am not a draft expert. I know what I’ve seen.

What I’ve seen, across the span of my adult life watching this franchise, is a Bears team that has been simultaneously six months from contending for the last forty years. Every offseason there is a new reason to believe: a new quarterback, a new coordinator, a new philosophy about whether defense wins championships or offense wins championships or the real championships were the friends we made along the way. This year the reason to believe is a young quarterback who is genuinely special and a defensive spending spree that was clearly real. Those are better reasons than most. I want to be fair. I am trying to be fair. The fair thing to say is that this Bears team is probably better than last year, that the defense is probably better than last year, and that the offense remains a theoretical proposition that will either be resolved in the draft or not resolved until next offseason, when I will be sitting in this same booth at Schaller’s writing essentially the same column.

They have a plan. They always have a plan. One year, maybe soon — and I mean this — I hope to write about what happens when it arrives.