It may just be a matter of when, not if, the Chicago Bears trade the draft’s No. 1 overall selection. And if you’re a Carolina Panthers fan currently reading this, you know who’s going to be in on that deal.
On Monday, Rich Eisen—on The Rich Eisen Show, of course—rattled off his five biggest takeaways from the 2023 NFL Scouting Combine. Among them was the Bears’ willingness to sell off the first pick, a process that’s seemingly way past “willing” at this point.
“The Bears are already long down the road of trading the first overall pick,” Eisen said. “Teams have been identified, compensation is being hammered out. And sure enough, I saw [Bears general manager] Ryan Poles say today—I believe in Peter King’s “Football Morning in America” column, if I’m not mistaken—saying that, ‘Hey, teams kinda wanna know, even before free agency begins, if they have a draft pick high enough to take a kid. And if a team wants that quarterback certainty this early in the process, they’re gonna have to pay for it.’”
It just so happens that King, in that very same column, reported that the Panthers are making an aggressive run at that top prize. In fact, they may even “overpay” to get it. King wrote:
The owner, David Tepper, has made it clear internally he wants a long-term answer at quarterback, and he wants it now. Indianapolis wouldn’t have to trade as much as Carolina for the pick, because it’d be moving up three spots. But the Panthers might be willing to overpay relative to the Colts, and if the Bears have enough “blue” players on the board to ensure they’d get one picking at nine, I could see them taking that deal.
And that deal, based off how far the Bears reportedly are in this process, may happen pretty soon.