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Courtney CroninApr 3, 2026, 09:00 PM<\/p>\n
Close<\/a>Courtney Cronin joined ESPN in 2017, originally covering the Minnesota Vikings before switching to the Chicago Bears in 2022. Courtney is a frequent panelist on Around the Horn and host of Best Week Ever and GameNight on ESPN Radio. She also co-hosts The Chicago Bears Podcast on ESPN 1000. She previously worked at the San Jose Mercury News as a multimedia sports journalist.<\/p>\n Multiple Authors<\/p>\n PHOENIX — By the time Ozzy Trapilo<\/a> started his seventh consecutive game at left tackle in early January, the Chicago Bears<\/a>‘ goal of sustaining consistency at the position, which had been in flux throughout the season, was becoming a reality.<\/p>\n Trapilo, whom the Bears drafted with the No. 56 pick last spring, had successfully made the transition from right to left tackle while supplanting Theo Benedet<\/a> in the process. At that point, he was the third player to start at left tackle in Chicago during the 2025 season.<\/p>\n But when Trapilo ruptured his patellar tendon ahead of the two-minute warning during the Bears’ win over the Green Bay Packers<\/a> in the NFC wild-card round, his injury set off a domino effect that threatens to undo the progress Chicago made at the position over the last year.<\/p>\n Best of NFL Nation \u2022 Titans’ Saleh open to drafting a pass rusher<\/a> “Obviously, you’d love to have your long-term starter for the next 10 years locked up,” coach Ben Johnson said at the NFL’s annual league meeting in Arizona. “There’s a lot of uncertainty right now though. We don’t know. Ozzy’s coming off a pretty serious injury. Not sure if we’ll have him next year or at what point he’ll come up. And so we’re going to have an opportunity right now for a lot of competition.”<\/p>\n Trapilo is expected to miss the majority of the 2026 season while he recovers, and how well the 6-foot-8 tackle plays upon his return remains a question the Bears won’t have the answer to for some time.<\/p>\n “Medically, we don’t have anything that says he can’t return to form,” general manager Ryan Poles told ESPN. “I think what makes it tough is it’s not one of those September injuries that you’re out for the season and then you get this ramp-up time. You’re ramping up while the train has already left to station for the season.<\/p>\n “And we’ve noticed that when you don’t have training camp to prepare, it’s really hard to replicate those reps to get prepared for live action and to play at a really high level. So I think that’s probably where it [Johnson’s expressed uncertainty] comes from a little bit more than anything. But there’s nothing that we’ve gotten to make this a unique situation where he can’t be himself. He’s progressing.”<\/p>\n The 2025 season for the Bears began with a massive overhaul along the offensive line when Chicago traded for guards Joe Thuney<\/a> and Jonah Jackson<\/a> and signed center Drew Dalman<\/a> in free agency. It continued into the second round of the draft when they selected Trapilo from Boston College and enacted a plan for him to switch from right tackle, where he logged 1,467 snaps from 2023 to 2024, to becoming the Bears’ franchise left tackle.<\/p>\n It took until Week 12 for Trapilo to become the starter on the left, but once he arrived, the rookie was on a trajectory towards holding down his spot long term.<\/p>\n Those moves resulted in quarterback Caleb Williams<\/a> taking 44 fewer sacks than he did as a rookie, and the Bears ranking No. 1 in pass block win rate (74%) and fifth in run block win rate (74%).<\/p>\n To give themselves the best chance of maintaining that success as a unit, the Bears quickly pivoted to trading for Garrett Bradbury<\/a> after Dalman’s surprise retirement last month. Thuney, who earned the NFL’s first-ever Protector of the Year award, and Jackson are back, as is right tackle Darnell Wright<\/a>, who earned second team All-Pro honors in 2025.<\/p>\n The Bears’ biggest order of business is preventing the left tackle spot from becoming a revolving door that hinders the progress they’ve made in building one of the league’s best O-line’s.<\/p>\n Editor’s Picks<\/p>\n 2 Related<\/p>\n “Anywhere, anytime you feel like you got it all together, it takes one thing to set it off,” Poles said. “We’re just trying to find the best solutions as possible. So when you throw Braxton [Jones], you throw Jedrick [Wills Jr.], Theo, Kiran [Amegadjjie], you have a lot of guys and there’s some uncertainty because no one’s played at a high level within the last 12 months. But we’re going to continue to find the best way to put the best five out there.”<\/p>\n Jones, who re-signed with the Bears on a one-year deal, started 44 games at left tackle in Chicago from 2022 to 2025. Injuries delayed his return to the field last offseason and landed him on injured reserve after injuring his knee in Week 7.<\/p>\n “I’m excited about where he’s at right now,” Johnson said. “He came in when he signed the contract and he looked like a brand-new man as far as I’m concerned. This guy was beefed up. He was probably 310 pounds and he looked yoked up. He’s very determined to get his career trajectory back to where it was before.”<\/p>\n Like Jones, Wills, a former first-round pick by the Browns, also enters the offseason with a clean bill of health for the first time in several years after a complex knee injury originally sustained in 2023 forced him to sit out the 2025 season to recover.<\/p>\n “He’s hungry to prove that he’s capable of being where he was drafted,” Johnson said. “And so we’re going to see what we can end up doing there. And you can’t rule out the draft either. I think we’ve put ourselves in a really good situation to where, much like last year, we can go into this draft and stay true to our board and not force any pick. If there’s a tackle or a defensive tackle or a D-end, I think we can go any direction we need to and stay true to that and feel pretty good about it. To give you clarity, it’s hard to say right now what that left tackle spot’s going to look like this year or five years from now.”<\/p>\n The Bears own the No. 25 pick in the first round and have additional selections on Day 2 at Nos. 57, 60 (from Buffalo) and 89. Though the pass rush remains one of the biggest holes that projects to be addressed early in the draft, selecting an offensive tackle early could become a reality to quell the uncertainty the team is experiencing at the position. Poles was in attendance for Alabama’s pro day last year where Kadyn Proctor<\/a> worked out for scouts. ESPN draft analyst Matt Miller projects Utah’s Caleb Lomu<\/a> and Clemson’s Blake Miller<\/a> to be available to Chicago with the 25th overall pick in his latest mock draft.<\/p>\n “But even with that, you have a rookie and there’s some uncertainty there too,” Poles said. “I feel like we’re just so used to living in that space where you gotta figure it out and find the best solutions.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Courtney CroninApr 3, 2026, 09:00 PM CloseCourtney Cronin joined ESPN in 2017, originally covering the Minnesota Vikings before…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":582685,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[559],"tags":[64,63,593,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-582684","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nfl","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-nfl","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/582684","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=582684"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/582684\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/582685"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=582684"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=582684"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=582684"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/r1636607_608x342_16-9.jpg\")
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\u2022 How the Maxx Crosby trade fell apart<\/a><\/p>\nThe Bears hope the injury to Ozzy Trapilo (75) doesn’t lead to a revolving door at left tackle.\u00a0David Banks\/Imagn Images<\/p>\n