With Khalil Mack in Chicago, the Monsters of the Midway are back

A franchise built on a rich history of defense just used one of the biggest failures in football history to lay the foundation for its future.

There’s an old saying that, as cliche as it is, always seems to hold up: One man’s trash is another’s treasure. The Oakland Raiders trading All-Pro future Hall of Fame linebacker Khalil Mack before he even hits his true prime is a bad example of trash because it’s not. How Oakland thought it was a good idea to let that type of a player go is going to be a question we dissect for years to come. Well, all of us except the Chicago Bears.

During those years, the Bears are going to be too busy competing for Super Bowls to worry about how the Raiders could have let this happen. The stars aligned, and now Mack is going to be anchoring a defense that has a rich history of being ferocious.

We can’t really think about how this happened, because it makes so little sense. Instead, we’re left with the nuclear fallout that will mutate the Bears from a team that maybe could be on the rise to one that will almost certainly be a force to be reckoned with in the coming seasons.

Already the Bears were positioned to be a team that grabs our attention. They traded up to draft a franchise quarterback (Mitchell Trubisky), hired a young offensive-minded head coach (Matt Nagy), and added a ton of free agents in the offseason designed to make the offense better (Allen Robinson, Trey Burton, Taylor Gabriel). Even before the season gets started there has been chatter that this Bears team could be what the Los Angeles Rams were last year as far as a team that goes from laughably bad to stunningly good.

Defensively the Bears upgraded too, selecting Roquan Smith in the first round of this year’s draft. Smith was directly compared to Mack as far as what his ceiling could be in the NFL, and now the Bears have both. Let’s not forget about Leonard Floyd, who rounds out the linebacking corps. Chicago also has Aikeem Hicks, Eddie Jackson, and Danny Trevathan as talent to fill in around the rest of the defense, not to mention this is now a unit that is exceedingly more attractive to free agents than it was this past March.

Chicago won’t be competing for a Super Bowl in 2018, no matter how exciting this trade is. Matt Nagy’s offense needs to come together and Trubisky needs to prove he can take a Jared Goff-level leap towards being a franchise quarterback. But so much has changed between when we were all trolling the Bears for trading up for Trubisky in 2016 (when they didn’t need to) and now where they look like a team with perhaps the brightest future in football.

Watch out in the years to come, the Monsters of the Midway are back from the dead, and ready to collect.