Chicago Bears: How Ryan Pace learned to draft 3rd round picks

The Chicago Bears haven’t had the best of luck in the 3rd round of the NFL draft in a long time. They haven’t found a decent talent there in over a decade.

This wasn’t always the case. Between 1998 and 2003, they found two genuine superstars in center Olin Kreutz and linebacker Lance Briggs. After that though, the Bears seemed to lose their touch. It’s been one long parade of average to outright terrible. That ended up costing them in 2009 and 2010 when they had back-to-back years without 1st or 2nd round picks. Now history is repeating itself.

GM Ryan Pace won’t get his 2019 draft started until late in the 3rd round this year thanks to the Khalil Mack and Anthony Miller trades. That means it will represent the best opportunity of this year to score a good player from this draft class. The problem is he hasn’t had much better luck in the 3rd round than his predecessors. Then again, that might be because he failed to heed the lesson his former mentor taught him about how to do so.

One he may try to implement this year.

Ryan Pace learned in New Orleans how to identify good 3rd rounders

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No team in the NFL since the turn of the millennium has been better in the 3rd round than the New Orleans Saints. The same team Pace worked for as a scout and executive from 2002 to 2014. Their GM Mickey Loomis has made 19 picks in the 3rd round during his career there. Four of them have become Pro Bowl players. All four have come since 2010. So clearly Loomis figured something out. What exactly was it?

The first part is easy. The player has to be a special kind of athlete in some shape or form and they had to have a specific reason for why they fell that had nothing to do with health concerns.

2010: Jimmy Graham

Played only one year of college football, having spent most of his athletic life in basketball.

2012: Akiem Hicks

Never played at a big school. Two years in junior college followed by two years in Canada.

2013: Terron Armstead

Came out of a small school at Arkansas-Pine Bluff. Was an unknown until combine breakout.

2017: Alvin Kamara

Never had over 700 yards in college. Also had multiple arrests on his record.

Pace has made two 3rd round selections during his time in Chicago. Neither has really followed this guideline. Hroniss Grasu was a good athlete but he was painfully undersized and understrength. He didn’t look like somebody who had the talent to go earlier than that. Jonathan Bullard was the same. A good athlete with explosiveness but undersized and understrength for the defense he was asked to play in.

Loomis began hitting on his 3rd round picks because he was willing to take calculated risks on standout talents because he trusts the system in place under Sean Payton was good enough to bring it out of them. For the first time, Pace has something similar in Matt Nagy.

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