A position Bears really need to fill

Bears quarterbacks are like the weather: Everybody owns an umbrella but nobody stops it from raining.

This franchise is back where it started a half-century ago, patching and taping and wishing and hoping against hope that what they have is better than what they could have.

Clearly it's time to do something about it by implementing a concept I have pondered for a while.

It starts with the fact that NFL teams have quarterbacks, quarterback coaches and quarterback camps.

So why don't they have quarterback scouts? Or directors of quarterback acquisition? Or even vice presidents of quarterbacks?

If the NFL isn't quarterback-centric, it's specialist-centric.

Offensive-line coaches have assistant offensive-line coaches in charge of teaching holding with the left hand instead of the right.

Special-teams coaches have assistant special-teams coaches, and the one who taught Devin Hester how to return kicks deserves a promotion.

This isn't just a football thing. Even Wal-Mart, which sells everything from medicine to medicine balls, has a chief toy officer.

So isn't it curious that NFL scouting departments, responsible for evaluating everybody from fat nose tackles to skinny wide receivers, don't have people whose sole responsibility is quarterbacks?

Bears general manager Jerry Angelo and his scouts are respected talent evaluators. But not even the best evaluators can be equally adept at judging players at every football position.

Some scouts have to be better at linemen, others at skill-position players … and one special guy has to be better at quarterbacks.

That's all the guy should do. He would compile a filing cabinet full of reports on everybody who ever played quarterback on any level.

He would sit in the basement in his pajamas and stare at big flow charts that constantly monitor quarterbacks. Then when he drives along and spots a youth game in a park, his car automatically would stop to see how the kid QBs throw.

He would travel the country to watch quarterbacks in NFL, college, junior college, high school and beer-league games.

Quiz him on the position and you'll never get the wrong answer.

"Who throws left-handed, stands 6-feet-3, weighs 225 pounds, has limited mobility and delivers slightly side-arm?"

"That would be Eddie St. Pierre, never went to college, works the fields in Louisiana, mother is a seamstress, father is serving life for murdering a clarinetist."

Correct.

"Who throws right-handed, stands 6-1, weighs 210 pounds, attends a Lutheran college in the Midwest and runs the 40 in 4.7?"

"That would be … no, it has to be … er, he must be … wait, no such quarterback exists."

Correct again.

Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems teams don't employ one guy -- a quarterback nerd, if you will -- to fill the role I'm describing.

And what team would need him more than the team that hasn't had a great quarterback since Sid Luckman back in the 1940s?

Apparently nobody was around to tell Bears management that Gary Huff, Mike Phipps, Bob Avellini and Peter Tom Willis … right through Cade McNown, Henry Burris, Chad Hutchinson and Kordell Stewart … and up to Rex Grossman, Brian Griese and Kyle Orton … that all were little more than throwaway throwers.

Seriously, somebody at Halas Hall has to scout the scouts to find that one guy who knows quarterbacks better than anyone else on the planet.