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The 2021 season was an unremarkable boondoggle for the Bears, and when new general manager Ryan Poles took over in January, he saw little worth clinging to from the 6-11 roster as he embarked on the rebuild.
It was a bizarre last-ditch effort by Ryan Pace and Matt Nagy to save their jobs: a team led by a castoff quarterback with no left tackle and a clearance rack secondary. Predictably, that got them nowhere.
The one redeeming quality of that team was that it sputtered so badly that chairman George McCaskey could no longer deny the necessity of change.