Harrison Grody

We can unpack the draft at whatever depth you want to go to and do it very, very sophisticated and with extreme detail.

We can talk about what still is needed on the defensive front.

But you zoom out and you look at the pie chart and you say Ben and Caleb 2.0, that's probably 66% to 75% of what is going to drive the success of

of the Bears this season two weeks from now we're going to get the actual schedule we're going to see how it lays out we'll probably talk about that for three days right like this is how this is the toughest stretch ultimately it all circles back to what steps does Caleb take what does Ben do to get those steps to be taken and it starts now with what they're doing in the offseason program and I just you know like the clip we heard coming in out of the break

was, I think to me, an indicator of a little bit of the roller coaster that Ben rode through the first couple months of the off season, where it's like he goes through the tape of last season and goes, man, we got a long way to go.

But then he looks at it and says, boy, we've come a long way, right?

And so there's this feeling of like, okay, there's some encouragement here because we saw the amount of progress that was made in 2025.

You replicate that in 2026.

Now, all of a sudden, that window of competition and competing for the biggest prizes opens wide.

No, it's muscle memory.

Well, and you can play defense with offense, too, by the way, that you're able to do some things that put strain on an opponent.

It was interesting because last week, Caleb spoke at the start of the offseason program as all the players were back in the building the Monday before the draft.

And I sort of asked him about kind of his request when Ben got here of like, I really want to be coached hard.

And then Ben saying, OK, watch this.

And then Caleb being willing to...

to respond to that even through some bumps obviously caleb was honest at the end of last season and saying like the relationship felt fragile at times like he didn't know if ben liked him because he wasn't meeting the standard we didn't know right i mean like you go back through training camp last year and like you're like man this was rickety it was genuinely rickety and then to see where they got to by the end of the season not just with the results on the field but the the connection you

It was very genuine.

You could feel the bond between those two guys and the way they invested in one another.

Caleb's answer to my question was essentially coaching matters.

And then he went one step further and said, but then that coaching has to be received.