The Chicago Bears are looking ahead to the 2025 season after concluding the team’s offseason program last week. New Bears head coach Ben Johnson has a tall task ahead of him, turning around a team that finished 5-12 a year ago. But there is some optimism heading into next year with second-year quarterback Caleb Williams.
With minicamp in the books, the Bears will now gear up for training camp next month. But not everybody on the roster will be invited back to Halas Hall. One Bear that was one of Ryan Poles’s first draft picks has been on the bubble throughout the season and the bottom may have fallen out as he’ll be lucky to survive before the team reports to training camp.
Bears DT Zacch Pickens Could Be Cut Before Training Camp
Zacch Pickens was a third-round pick by the Bears in the 2023 draft but hasn’t made the impact Poles has been hoping for. The South Carolina product appeared in all 17 games in his rookie season, but you may have missed it as he logged just 20 total tackles, one tackle for loss, a pass defense and a forced fumble.
For some rookies, that may have been a modest step toward improvement. But Pickens appeared in just nine games during his sophomore season. Even worse, Pickens had posted an 8.4% pass rush win rate on 103 snaps, and his 42.1 run defense grade was the second-lowest on the team according to Pro Football Focus.
With Pickens failing to step up, the Bears were aggressively improving their trenches this offseason. Grady Jarrett was one of Chicago’s first free agent signings and signed Dayo Odeyingbo soon after, who is expected to play both on the inside and on the edge in Dennis Allen’s defense. The second-round selection of Shemar Turner added more depth and leaves Pickens fifth on the depth chart behind the returning Andrew Billings.
Jarrett has already drawn positive reviews and Turner is a long-term fixture of the Bears' defense. Odeyingbo can be a solid reserve at best, and Billings was a solid player before suffering a pectoral injury. With the exception of Turner, all of them have shown more than Pickens has in his first two seasons and the rookie isn’t far behind.
That could make Pickens expendable and cause Chicago to throw in the towel on another selection in Poles’s first draft class.