They turned out to be wrong, but I think they thought they did try to massively improve Daniels' weapons. On paper, McLaurin, Deebo, and Brown with superspeedy Lane and Bill plus Swiss army knife McCaffrey sounds pretty good. The adds were Deebo, Lane, and Bill. The problems were injuries. We lost Mclaurin until effectively the season was over. Brown really never took the field at all. Bill held up his end of the deal. Lane showed some ability to get open deep (but dropped too many opportunities and then got hurt and IRed). I mean it's hard to field a strong unit if your starting five is McLaurin, Deebo, Brown, Lane, and McCaffrey and your reality is Chosen, Deebo, and other guys off the street.
I know you know this and aren't discounting it, but four of our top five receivers missed more than six games and some were closer to ten or the whole season. So, the front office didn't punt on supplying weapons, it's just that too many of them turned out to be duds.
I also had pretty high hopes for the secondary: Lattimore, Amos, Sainristil, Quan, and Harris didn't feel like neglect and when Harris came back the secondary did get better even though again... Lattimore and Amos were on IR. So, I don't think they punted on trying to improve units. The injury bug just killed this team. We kept having to rely on fifth stringers on almost every unit.
I don't think so as to WR. Sounded crappy to me and I said so before the season. The starting lineup sounded meh at best. But the depth was ridiculously bad. Comical. I've followed the team a long time of course, I've never seen worse depth. But to make it even more absurd is their starting Z WR, was over 30 and never had a healthy season in their career, and was hurt all off season to boot, and yet they decided to let it ride with no net behind him as the starting Z WR. While I defended injuries as the prime reason for the team's collapse -- the WR spot is 100% on Peters. And I am not alone on this, several people who cover the team and generally like Peters echo my point.
Even Keim in a podcast said the knew from speaking to sources with the team they thought they needed another off season to complete the roster and knew they were especially thin at Wr and edge with no margin for error.
Deebo was a good trade, I recall you don't think so, but he's a gadget WR, he's gravy. Banking on a raw late 4th round Wr (I was very familiar with him I talked about him pre draft, he ran very basic routes in college, screens-hitches), who even the team told reporters they see him as a punt returner this coming season not so much WR, doesn't mean anything to me. Ditto the late third rounder McCaffrey who had an underwhelming rookie season.
But the kicker was Noah Brown as your Z. Even Standig who is actually ironically the king of don't spend resources at Wr narratives, couldn't even get this, and still doesn't and asked Peters about it at the end of the year press conference. Peters explained that they had designs on some WRs but they were out of their price range. And to quote him "they learned a lesson" on this.
When Chris Moore can't catch a ball to save his life yet kept getting starts at X with Terry out -- a reporter checked in with the team on this as to why they are sticking with Moore and the response he got is he's the only backup on the team that knows how to run the routes at X -- wow, pathetic. And that spot was as poorly put together that I can ever recall in my years following the team.
The good news is I gather the team gets their mistake and will fix it. But on the off chance they don't, I'll be pushing for Peters to be canned. You can't be the team that's the punchline again as to where a young QB doesn't want to go to -- and when you got Jayden's pal and Jayden's mom liking social media posts that goof on how little he had to work with at WR, you begin to flirt with that narrative. The teams young QBs go to die for decades have been the Bears, Washington, the Jets, Browns. The Bears are the team to escape that label. Washington seemed to escape it last year but IMO are smack now back into the TBD category on this.
You want a team that takes helping the young QB seriously, its basically every other team almost in the NFL but the Bears espeically make the comparison absurd. The Bears take it VERY seriously. This team does it half baked which is better than nothing but not nearly good enough.
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