Chicago Bears training camp promises to be the most competitive in years

The Chicago Bears didn’t win the NFC North last season, and they didn’t make the playoffs as a wild-card team. In fact, their season was realistically over before the calendar flipped to December.

Yet, after landing quarterback Caleb Williams with the first pick in the 2024 NFL Draft and signing veteran stars like Keenan Allen and D’Andre Swift, the excitement around this year’s Bears is what you’d expect for a perennial playoff team.

Williams, Allen, and Swift are just a few of the all-around upgrades GM Ryan Poles made to the roster since last season. The 2024 Chicago Bears are a far cry from the 2022 team he inherited, and as a result, players, young and old, have a fight on their hands to make the final squad.

“This is kind of a different situation than we’ve been in the first two years,” Poles said Friday from Halas Hall. “A lot of these position battles are going to be tight. And it gets harder and harder to kind of create that 53-man roster just because there’s an influx of talent. So, it’s challenging, but it’s a good problem to have.”

“Our roster’s better now,” Matt Eberflus said, “so there’s more competition. We welcome that.”

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Eberflus has always championed competition as a critical element for success. There will be a whole lot of it at Halas Hall over the next few weeks.

“We have to evaluate the numbers as coaches,” Eberflus said. “Don’t look at the person, the personality, look at what he’s doing on the grass. That, to me, is going to be so important: how we evaluate that and really get our depth set because we know we’re going to need everybody on the roster during the course of the year. We’ve got to develop those guys as we go.”