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Rozner: Chicago Bears still going wrong direction

Bright spots are not easy to find for the Chicago Bears these days.

But you know GM Ryan Pace will be "fired up" about being so bad in 2017 that he might be looking at a top-three pick in the NFL draft.

Again.

The Bears are 3-8 after a humiliating loss in Philadelphia on Sunday, and after three years in charge of the organization, Pace will apparently be rewarded with another chance to draft high.

That's the prize for being consistently terrible in an awful league where you don't even have to be good to finish .500.

But the Bears can't even manage mediocre.

Yet, as is the case every Sunday, John Fox was trending on Twitter throughout a brutal first half, the calls from across Bears Nation to fire the head coach.

He will undoubtedly be the scapegoat for this misery, but the beating Sunday was another reminder of how bad a job Pace has done collecting talent.

Down 24-0 after 30 minutes, the Bears had the ball for only 9:50.

The Eagles outgained the visitors 272-33 through two quarters.

The Bears did not stumble into a single first down, while Philadelphia had 16 in the first half.

Vince Lombardi isn't walking through that door - and if he did he would take one look at the players available, turn around and walk right back out that door.

This is hardly a defense of Fox, who manages games like it's 1975 in the Black and Blue Division, but he's not the reason this team is terrible.

Any suggestion along those lines is merely an attempt to spare Pace the responsibility he so richly deserves.

And while the GM fiddles - and gets a free pass - the organization smells of cinder and Lake Forest is glowing.

The Bears have lost four straight since getting back to 3-4 with wins over Baltimore and Carolina, and it's starting to feel just as bad as it did when Phil Emery was already finished at this point in his third season.

And Emery was 23-20 after 43 games. Pace is 12-31.

The embarrassment Sunday wasn't in losing 31-3 to a team with the best record in the NFL; it was in knowing that the Bears didn't belong on the same field with the Eagles.

That's hard to do in an NFL where the line between good and bad is a handful of playmakers.

After three years of building a team, where are the Pace playmakers?

They were hard to find Sunday, though on the other side was Alshon Jeffery, who left Chicago for Philadelphia in March, and he had to be chuckling quietly at his former team and its dearth of targets.

Adding insult to back story, Jeffery got to the Bears' defense for 5 catches, 52 yards and a touchdown, 3 of those grabs for first downs, twice on third down.

The Eagles piled up 420 yards and it could have been much worse had Philadelphia displayed any interest in playing the second half.

Meanwhile, the Bears have few weapons, and when Mitch Trubisky mixed in a good throw with plenty of bad Sunday, there were also several drops among the Bears' vaunted receiving corps.

Penalties, sacks, interceptions and fumbles were all part of an ugly defeat that summed up nicely the state of the franchise for a team going nowhere against a team with Super Bowl aspirations.

What you saw on the other side was a whole lot of talent.

What you saw on the Bears' side was, well, a 3-8 team.

brozner@dailyherald.com

• Hear Barry Rozner on WSCR 670-AM and follow him @BarryRozner on Twitter.

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