The NFL draft is always something of a crapshoot even in the best of years, but teams that are picking in the Top 10 are generally expected to land a player who will be a long-term starter. When a team fails to do that, it can set the franchise back a year or more. That's exactly what happened to the Chicago Bears in the 2015 NFL draft when they drafted receiver Kevin White with the 7th overall pick.
Bears fans need no refresher on how this worked out for the team. For everyone else, White suffered a leg injury in training camp and did not play at all during his rookie year. In 2016, he played in just four games and caught only 19 passes before suffering another season-ending injury.
Surely 2017 was a better year, you say. Nope. In fact, it was worse! White appeared in just one game and recorded two catches before missing the rest of the season due to yet another injury.
Tragically, injuries derailed what could have been a promising career before White ever really had a chance to prove himself and Bears fans would probably give anything for a do-over.
Well, the folks at Pro Football Focus have done exactly that by running a 2015 NFL redraft. In this attempt with the benefit of hindsight, PFF has the Bears passing on White at 7th overall and instead selecting a different receiver: Tyler Lockett, who originally went in the third round to the Seattle Seahawks.
While far from the most decorated receiver in the NFL, Lockett has proven to be a steady, reliable contributor in the passing game for the past 10 years. He's never recorded less than 550 yards in a season, and from 2018 through 2022, he did not fall below 950 yards. In that time, he's been a first-team All-Pro once, second-team All-Pro twice, and a one-time Pro Bowler.
It's unclear how much this would have changed the future for the Chicago Bears. They won just 14 games between 2015 and 2017, so it's not like they were a Tyler Lockett away from competing for a Super Bowl. The 2018 season was a fun yet flukey season, as the Bears won their first division title since 2010 but ended with the infamous Double-Doink missed field goal in the Wild Card round. Here, receivers were not the problem for Chicago.
At the very least, it would have been one less painful draft memory for a fanbase that seems plagued by such blunders.
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