Welcome in to another edition of the Under Center podcast here on NBC Sports Chicago.

I'm JJ Stankovic, joined at Hall by Cam Ellis, and it's the return of John Moon

Mullen to the podcast.

We are back in the coat closet, Moon, and the NFL draft is done.

Moon, since we haven't had you on the pod in quite a while,

give us your first reaction to the Chicago Bears 2019 NFL draft. Well, my first reaction was in

that little presser with asking Ryan Pace, are you drafting for a flag football team here?

Because nobody over 220,000 need to apply this year.

It's the first time he hasn't drafted an offense or alignment of some sort.

So, you know, hard to know the takeaways.

You almost, there's no, I won't call a marquee player here.

But again, I think the overall mojo was not as much around Chicago.

We don't have a one or a two.

So almost by definition, you may not be getting a big around Chicago. We don't have a one or a two. So almost by definition,

you may not be getting a big name player. I don't know. I mean, this is one of those, every year you really do say, when they talk about it needs three years to let a draft play out. I don't agree

with that necessarily, but you sure can't grade a draft on draft day most of the time. Yeah, to me it sort of felt like maybe even outside of Montgomery, it was sort of, they had the luxury of saying, hey, maybe we'll try this guy and see what sticks.

You don't draft a wide receiver in the fourth round if with this wide receiver move, you're not sort of just seeing what happens.

So it seems like maybe, at least to me, they sort of thought, hey, this isn't necessarily our draft to go knock a home run out. Let's try and go to the other way.

Yeah. And so let's just start kind of now with this thought that Ryan Pace, specifically with

Riley Ridley, that's where I want to start. I don't, we'll get to David Montgomery later.

But Ryan Pace said that Riley Ridley was, quote, by far the highest ranked player on the Bears' draft board.

So in years past, when the Bears had hole after hole after hole to fill, and they had to fill it during the draft because they couldn't fill it all in free agency, you probably couldn't have really gone and stuck to best player available.

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