Whenever an NFL team trades prized early-round draft choices for a player, or spends big money in free agency to make a high-profile addition, some football traditionalists scoff at the idea of building a contender that way. Quite often, they're right. But not always, as the Chicago Bears have demonstrated by reaching Sunday's NFC title game.
The Bears made moves over the past two offseasons that irked traditionalists, trading a handsome package of draft picks to the Denver Broncos for quarterback Jay Cutler in 2009 and signing free agent defensive end Julius Peppers to a lucrative contract last March. The Bears have made that roster-building formula work for them; they'll host the Green Bay Packers at Soldier Field late Sunday afternoon with a trip to the Super Bowl at stake.
Even so, Bears General Manager Jerry Angelo said Wednesday he wasn't trying to change conventional NFL wisdom about how to assemble a successful team. "To me, these are aberrations," Angelo said in a telephone interview. "I don't look at it like we changed our model." The Bears chose to buck convention, Angelo said, because they regarded Cutler and Peppers as the sort of proven, potentially fortune-changing players who aren't available often.
"We all know the impact of a quarterback, even more so in today's game than 10 or 15 years ago," Angelo said. "In Tampa [where Angelo worked in the Buccaneers' front office], we had a lot of success but we usually sort of played around the quarterback position. I came here, and we were in kind of the same position. We had some success. We even got to the Super Bowl in '06. But that's very difficult to do.
"When the opportunity to get Cutler came along, here was a guy who was a great talent and established at the NFL level," Angelo said. "We said, 'How do you put a price on that?' Looking back, we would do it exactly the same. With Peppers, you don't see it happen very often that a player like that is available. The closest thing, I think, is you have to go back to Reggie White."
The Washington Redskins have been sharply criticized in recent years for spending lavishly in free agency and trading away draft picks but achieving little success in return. The Redskins continued to struggle after signing defensive lineman Albert Haynesworth to a then-record free-agent contract and trading draft choices for quarterback Donovan McNabb. But people around the league said the Bears' results show that such an approach can produce on-field rewards if the trades are wise and the free-agent money is well spent.
"The message it sends is there's more than one way to do it," Indianapolis Colts President Bill Polian said this week. "I think Jerry and Lovie [Smith, the Bears' coach], particularly Jerry, have done a magnificent job putting this team together. The thing it says to me is that the McCaskey family [which owns the team] and Jerry and Lovie have stayed the course and they've been rewarded for it. You know, there were a lot of hard times there in between. And they've stayed the course, and they've gotten it right."
Cleveland Browns President Mike Holmgren said the Cutler and Peppers moves paid off for the Bears in part because the rest of their roster already was close to a championship-caliber team.
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