Why are the Chicago Bears being so secretive?
The Chicago Bears donned the pads and stepped on the field at Halas Hall for the first time in front of the media on Monday. We recently highlighted how the intensity would be ratcheted up as a result.
While Mitchell Trubisky and Nick Foles have been working out with the team for a couple of weeks now, Monday was the first “real practice.” In light of COVID-19, fans are not allowed to attend training camp this year. In fact, even if there was no global pandemic, fan attendance was likely going to be greatly reduced at Bears camp. That’s because they had shifted operations from Bourbonnais to Halas Hall, where capacity was already going to be limited.
So with the prospect of having real live people on site to be the fans’ eyes and ears, Bears Twitter was certainly following social media closely on Monday waiting for all of those reports to trickle in — and then, they didn’t come.
That’s because the Bears treated the practice as if it was “closed” meaning reporters were not allowed to live-tweet what they were seeing. However, it doesn’t seem to end there, as the team was not allowing reporters to provide each quarterback’s completion statistics.
Meanwhile, other teams across the league were not only allowing updates and live-tweeting but were live-streaming portions of their practice for fans. Among them was the New England Patriots, led by Bill Belichick who is undoubtedly the most secretive coach in the NFL.
Despite that, the Bears continue to guard their practice as if it was a silo full of plutonium. All of the secrecy begs the question, “why?” Especially with respect to the portions of practice where the team is not working on their offense, why not give the fans a glimpse of what they would see if they were there in person?
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But even more puzzling is why they are restricting reporters from giving the fans the one thing they are thirsting for — an honest assessment of how the quarterbacks are performing.
Ironically, Matt Nagy recently said he was going to be very transparent and honest with the quarterbacks, noting he would have no problem telling either of the quarterbacks, “you’re playing like crap.”
So why shield them from external criticism? Are they really trying to protect the integrity of their scheme, or is this more about protecting fragile psyches?
Myself, along with other Bears fans were under the impression the kid gloves would be coming off this preseason, but there seems to be an element within the Bears camp that wants to protect its quarterback(s) at all costs from negative attention. While the team plans to air a “behind the scenes” look at camp, based on how protective they’ve been, it’s unlikely to be too revealing.
Far be it from me to suggest how to run a training camp, but I feel fairly confident in saying if your quarterback can’t handle the stress of training camp, you need to find a new quarterback.