Rozner: GM in place, Bears must pick up Pace

As the Bears announced in a news release Thursday afternoon that they had hired Ryan Pace as general manager, one sentence jumped out.

While working as a pro scout for the Saints, “(Pace) was a part of the franchise in 2005 while the club dealt with immense adversity having to guide itself through several moves in base operations in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.”

In other words, perfectly qualified to work for the Lake Forest Circus, keeping his wits about him while all others have misplaced theirs.

All three rings are currently filled at Halas Hall, clowns to the left of him, jokers to the right and stuck in the middle eternally, holding all the veto and purse power, with George McCaskey and Ted Phillips.

Good luck to Ryan Pace.

He will say things on Friday that sound great and he will say things on Friday that appeal to members of the family and those who believe there is a great Bears history.

McCaskey and Phillips will talk again — unless someone advises them otherwise — about the Bears' way, reminding everyone that the Bears' way is bad. The Bears way is losing. The Bears' way is 5 playoff wins in 25 years under Michael McCaskey, George McCaskey and Ted Phillips.

That's the Bears' way.

If Pace is as smart as NFL people claim, he will not speak about the Bears' way. He will instead speak about a winning way, and give fans his road map to consistent playoff appearances.

Regardless of what Pace says in his first opportunity in front of the media, he will be universally applauded because he's not Phil Emery, just as Emery was universally applauded because he wasn't Jerry Angelo.

What's particularly odd is that the Bears passed on Chris Ballard, a man who worked for the Bears for more than a decade under Angelo and Emery, and was considered the best GM candidate not named Eric DeCosta, who let it be known that he would never work for the Bears as long as Phillips was entrenched.

But in their haste to turn public opinion on their side, worrying about optics and embarrassment — two things that generally decide major Bears decisions — McCaskey and Phillips decided to go against conventional wisdom.

The last time they did that, the Bears wound up with Phil Emery and Marc Trestman.

We will hear over the next days and weeks that Pace is an extremely hard worker, extraordinarily bright, overtly conscientious and shockingly great at everything he does.

We heard all the same about Emery and Trestman.

And all of it is gibberish.

The Bears don't know what they got and they are hopeful they got the right guy. Fans have every right to be optimistic and, frankly, the odds are in the Bears' favor that they finally got lucky with a hire after getting so many wrong for so very long.

And if you're skeptical, well, the last three decades give you more than enough reason to believe the Bears will never get it right until they turn the hiring process over to football people, and allow football people to make the financial decisions.

Had that been the case before, had there been someone in place with the football acumen to understand what they were doing, extensions for Jay Cutler and Brandon Marshall probably never would have happened.

Nevertheless, Pace starts with a clean slate and he will need years to fix the mess created by McCaskey, Phillips, Angelo and Emery.

Pace is a pro side guy, so to get this year's draft correct, he'll need to rely on the same Bears scouts that have failed in the past. Unless, of course, he moves quickly to bring in someone he trusts to get it right.

Furthermore, the Saints are a salary cap mess and they've gotten worse on the field as Pace has progressed through the New Orleans organization.

And none of it matters now.

It doesn't matter that Ballard probably wanted assurances of autonomy, that Pace is younger, less experienced and unlikely to demand the kind of authority Ballard and DeCosta want.

It doesn't matter that Phillips' close relationship with Saints GM Mickey Loomis probably played a large role.

It doesn't matter that if George and Ted want a particular coach, Pace will hire that coach.

It doesn't matter what Pace thinks of Jay Cutler.

Not yet, at least. Not yet, considering the big picture.

What matters now is scouting and drafting players. You can look back at most of what's gone wrong with the Bears over the last 25 years and point directly to failed draft classes.

The Bears on the field are just as bad as they are off the field, and it's going to take courage and patience to rebuild a 5-11 team that has no reason think it can make the playoffs next year or the year after that.

They need to draft well and draft well for several years to dig out of this massive hole, and Pace must be given the time and freedom necessary to make it work.

It's much bigger than the coach, bigger than the quarterback, bigger than all the nonsense spewed by McCaskey and Phillips about knowing the Bears' way.

All Pace needs to know about that is it's the wrong way.

brozner@dailyherald.com

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