It is still a topic of buzz even almost a full year later. The Chicago Bears executed the Khalil Mack trade, one of the most seismic in recent NFL history. In the span of a few days, a top defense in the league added one of the best pass rushers in his physical prime. His impact was instant, elevating the unit to the best in professional football.
The question people continue to have is how? How in the world did the Bears pull this off? There are bits and pieces one could put together to provide a fairly clear picture. However, for the first time fans got a behind-the-scenes glimpse courtesy of the team’s front office trio of Director of Player Personnel Josh Lucas, Assistant Director of Player Personnel Champ Kelly, and Director of College Scouting Mark Sadowski.
During their panel at the Bears 100th anniversary celebration, they broke it all down. They began to get a feeling that it might be possible as far back as the starting of training camp last July. Despite this, they refused to believe the Oakland Raiders would actually do it. Nonetheless, GM Ryan Pace kept checking in anyway. If it was true, he wanted to make sure they were in on it.
It took over a month, but things finally broke during the 4th preseason game at the end of August.
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Khalil Mack trade gained steam as Bears were preparing final cuts
Lucas explained that upon arrival at Soldier Field that day, he realized by how Pace and others were acting that things had gotten serious. The problem was that after the contest finished, teams would beginning trimming down their rosters from 90 players to 53.
“So 31 teams are cutting 37 guys, and that’s all we do is scour those lists to see if any of those guys could potentially improve our 53-man roster and could any of these guys potentially be guys we can assign to our practice squad.
So Champ, myself, our pro department, we’re running around all day that day getting ready for everything that’s about to happen.
And Joey and Ryan and Matt never came out of Ryan’s office. Not once. So we knew we were in it, it was all going to come down to who the Raiders selected, who the Raiders wanted to trade him to.
I think we had an advantage because they wanted him to get out of the AFC, so being an NFC team, I think we had a pretty good chance. I don’t think the Raiders thought we were going to be any good last year, so they wanted our first-round pick. So I think that played a part of it.
And probably about six or seven p.m. Friday night, the Raiders agreed to trade him to us.”
That was it. A mixture of persistence from Pace along with a bit of good luck by being a team in the NFC and coming off a losing season all came together to help them win this lottery. Mack arrived in Chicago at the beginning of September without training camp or any sort of knowledge of the playbook. Then he debuted in Green Bay with a sack, a forced fumble, a recovered fumble, and a pick-six.
He finished the season with 12.5 sacks and the Bears were in the playoffs for the first time in eight years.
