The Take Purge

Tim Brusveen
a few seconds ago
7 min read

In teaching, there is a line that says, “good teachers are good thieves.” Meaning that sometimes it’s not about a brand new, wonderful idea, it’s about taking someone else’s already established good idea. I like the Ringer Fantasy Football Show/The Ringer NFL Draft Show for my drives to work. It’s fun football talk without a lot of talk like they invented the sport which you’ll find on lots of other football shows. Anywho, they have a show they do before the Draft and before the season called The Take Purge where they get to simply state their takes that they have been ruminating on. The catch is that it is a type of hot take safe space in which they cannot be held accountable for being incorrect, much like the Purge movies. Well, I’m stealing that idea. Here are some things I think about the upcoming draft that I cannot be held accountable for if they are wrong.

-Jordan Tyson is going to be a Peter North sized bust. He can’t stay healthy, he isn’t particularly strong or long and doesn’t produce after the catch. Bad teams stay bad because they take a guy like Tyson because they have seen him run drills on air on Instagram and let someone like Makai Lemon slide into the teens. Taking Tyson over Lemon is going to be some team’s Jalen Reagor over Justin Jefferson moment and somehow there will be surprise that the Biletnikoff winner, unanimous All-American is better than a guy who missed games every year of his college career with injuries.

-Players drafted at the top of this draft are going to be seen as “busts” in the future but their draft slotting is more due to the fact that this year’s draft stinks. Arvell Reese and David Bailey both remind me of guys from last year. Reese a kind of tweener linebacker who you aren’t sure what exactly his position is, same as Jalon Walker (drafted 15 by Atlanta) and David Bailey is a pass-rush specialist (and a very good one) who likely will never have a three-down impact like James Pearce (drafted 26th by Atlanta and now playing in the California Penal League). Reese and Bailey are both going to go Top 5. The expectations are going to be much higher despite the level of talent being pretty similar to guys taken 15 and 26 last year.

-You may as well just forfeit the pick rather than take a QB after the second round. I’ve seen mocks this year with all the QB needy teams taking Carson Beck or Drew Allar in the 4th round. Why? 27/32 projected starting QBs this year (including Aaron Rodgers on the Steelers) were taken in the first two rounds. With 22 of them being first rounders. The five outside the Top 60 were: Brock Purdy (great!), Dak (great!), Malik Willis (eh), Sheduer (yikes) and Jacoby Brissett (good luck). Since 2016 (the year Dak was drafted), there have been 87 QBs taken in the rounds 3-7. Two are real starters. Well, what about backups? Some teams like to have something invested in their backup QB bub. Sure, 12 of the current backups in the NFL are former first round picks as well and another three were undrafted. So only half of the backups in the NFL are 3-7 round picks. That list includes such luminaries as Jared Stidham, Aidan O’Connell, Dillon Gabriel and Brady Cook. Backup QB strategy in the NFL is one of two things: a competent player who has demonstrated some level of success in the NFL who can keep you afloat (Marcus Mariota, Mitch Trubisky, Jameis Winston, Teddy Bridgewater) or who gives a shit, iif our QB gets hurt the season is over, it’s not worth any level of investment. Any team using a 4th or 5th round pick on Garrett Nussmeier or Cade Klubnik, doesn’t know ball as the kids say.

-The Bears are going to take CB Chris Johnson from San Diego State. This is where it gets Charlie Kelly level red string crazy. The Bears do a YouTube show called 1920 Football Drive that’s a behind the scenes documentary of all of their stuff. They did the free agency and scouting episode this week. They were showing all of the work that goes into scouting and signing guys, etc. Except they made a special point to show one of their scouts at the SDSU Pro Day, the only player I’m even aware of in the draft from SDSU is Johnson. Well big deal, they go to lots of pro days. Sure, but in this particular instance, the Bears scout (I don’t remember who) was mic’d up, talking to an SDSU coach about a player and the coach was gushing about him. As we all know in 2026, content is king and teams love to do full on “path to the draft” features about the guys they end up taking. Why mic up a random scout at a random pro day? Why clip that particular conversation? It’s so when they take Johnson and do his feature, they’ll have footage to talk about “knew it from Day 1.” I have spoken.

-Offensive tackle has been vastly overestimated as a need for the Bears in this draft. OK, they take a first round tackle who is a bit of a project, then the Jedrick Wills signing is useless and you set that money on fire that you didn’t have. He’s the tackle project. They already have six tackles on the roster; Wills, Braxton Jones, Darnell Wright, Ozzy Trapilo, Kiran Amegadjie (confession: I wrote this line as five tackles and forgot about one of Poles’ signature moves Kiran, likely because he’s getting cut as soon as feasible) and Theo Benedet. Does a rookie squeeze out Benedet? Maybe. Do they not have any sort of confidence in a Trapilo return? Maybe. Yet, they clearly liked Benedet enough to start him some and play him a lot last year and they can’t possibly know the extent to which Trapilo is out yet. If they take an early tackle, they are essentially giving up on Trapilo, a second round pick last year. Right tackle is obviously held by Darnell Wright for as long as he wants it, left tackle goes to the highly drafted guy this year. That’s a pretty drastic decision to make about a premium draft pick only three months removed from the injury. Plus, if they need to break glass in case of emergency they can use Joe Thuney there. That’s a lot of traffic to justify using a premium pick to add more.

-Center is being vastly overestimated as a need for the Bears in this draft. Poor Garrett Bradbury, guy gets traded for and the only thing anyone can talk about is how fast they can draft his replacement. At 30, he’s obviously not young anymore and with only one year left on his deal, it’s natural to see him as a rental but… why? 30 isn’t 50. The offensive line aging curve is different than most other positions, just look at Joe Thuney. And with the way that defenses are continuing to evolve, doesn’t it make lots of sense to have the position that Ben Johnson calls “the quarterback of our run game” to be someone who has kind of seen it all in this league? The plan with Drew Dalman was for him to be the long-term center so unless the talent drop off is absolutely massive doesn’t investing in Bradbury to be the center for the next 3-5 years and using your draft capital to draft guys who can impact the roster right now? Not to mention, there is a similar roster crunch like there is with the tackles. They used a sixth round pick on Luke Newman last year, granted that’s not a second but he was drafted with the idea that he could be a developmental center. That’s a pretty quick pivot away from a recent draft pick. Jordan McFadden was tendered a contract after a surprise start in the playoffs and looked downright competent. Amegadjie might get some work at guard or even center in camp to try and salvage that pick. All that is to say the cupboard is pretty far from bare on the offensive line, especially when the idea is to use a top 100 pick to add another player.

-Ryan Poles actually built an offensive line (or more likely got out of the way and let Ben Johnson build an offensive line) and found some really good value in the draft on the offensive side last year. Of course, I give him very little credit for any of that. It’s not a coincidence that the minute a supremely talented offensive coach came into the building, the decisions on the offensive side of the ball got smarter. The defensive decisions were still mostly terrible and the draft picks sucked. However, Poles maneuvered the draft very well last year. His ability to see both Bryce Young and CJ Stroud as unworthy of the #1 pick (despite getting lucky on the backend of that trade) and general positioning in the draft has been very good. His actual selections leave something to be desired but his ability to find himself in a spot to add impact players is pretty good. He also could have very easily gotten caught up in sentiment and tried to continue to make the DJ Moore experiment work and he didn’t (although, again how much of that was Johnson? Probably a lot.) All of this to say is that for the first time since he was hired, immediately decided to lose on purpose and plunge the Bears into irrelevance for half a decade… I’m willing to consider the possibility that he isn’t terrible at his job, simply mediocre when surrounded by smart people. This draft will go a long way in him reaching that hallowed ground of the competent middle.