Bear Goggles On

We are less than two weeks away from the 2023 NFL Draft. Mock drafts are going out the door like crazy. Personally, I have done a few mock drafts this offseason that included trading down and also taking Paris Johnson. Ideally, I'd love to see Poles move back one more time if the right players are still on the board. However, it is also important to hit a home run when you held the top pick in the draft just a little over a month ago. We ran a mock draft recently on The Halas Huddle Podcast and this was our third of a four-part series. It's interesting though that the mock draft worked out the way it did when the rumors floating around about a particular player being on Ryan Poles' radar is exactly who fell to us at nine overall. We decided to run a four-part series of full mock drafts to get an idea of what a Chicago Bears mock could look like depending on how the Bears attacked the first round. Listen for the full breakdown of the mock draft and the reasoning for the picks over other prospects who may have been available. In our first mock, we pigeonholed ourselves into only taking an offensive tackle. In the second one, we forced our hand at only taking a defensive lineman. Finally, in the most recent of the four and the mock draft I'm addressing today, we went with the best player available. Surprisingly enough, the two players I expected to be in the debate were not available and a player I wasn't expecting indeed fell to us at nine. There were some trade-back options but we were not allowed to trade back due to our own rules and restrictions in place. Here's how the draft shook out in the end.