Chicago Bears: 3 free agent options from the AAF

We take a look at potential Chicago Bears targets coming out of the opening week of the Alliance of American Football.

If you’re a Chicago Bears fan — and more specifically a football fan — and you were jonesing for football now that the NFL season is over, you may have taken a peek at the Alliance of American Football this past weekend.

The AAF is the brainchild of Hall of Famer and former executive for the Buffalo Bills and Indianapolis Colts, Bill Polian and Charlie Ebersol. The vision behind the eight-team league is to provide a professional football league that can serve as a pipeline (think minor league without team affiliation) for the NFL.

In order to accomplish this vision, the founders felt it was essential to hire quality coaches to give the league instant credibility, but also, to address what it perceived to be a shortfall in how the NFL coaches some of the more peripheral players. Obviously, the backups and practice squad players don’t get the same quality of practice time as the starters, and so it becomes difficult for them to truly improve their craft.

What the AAF does is allow these players to continue to work on their game and get the attention and coaching focus they otherwise would not have gotten at the NFL level. That could be huge for the NFL considering the number of undrafted free agents the league has on its rosters. This should only improve the quality of those types of players going forward.

It may also help a player breakthrough and reemerge onto the NFL scene once they are able to fine tune their game in the AAF. With that in mind, we look at three players who impressed this weekend and could be ones to keep an eye on going forward.