Öffentlicher Bereich » After piling up their offensive future

http://www.thebearslockerroom.com/authentic-anthony-miller-jersey , the Bears add a feisty developmental cornerback."Being who you thought we were since 2005!Log In or Sign UpLog InSign UpFanpostsFanshotsSectionsBearsOddsAboutMastheadCommunity GuidelinesStubHubMoreAll 322 blogs on Horizontal - WhiteFanposts Fanshots Sections Latest NewsThe Bears DenNotesXs and OsSuperfansLatest NewsFrom The Desk Of...Roster Analysis2019 NFL Draft: Bears draft Duke Shelley at No. 205 overallNew,44commentsAfter piling up their offensive future, the Bears add a feisty developmental cornerback. CDTShareTweetShareShare2019 NFL Draft: Bears draft Duke Shelley at No. 205 overallScott Sewell-USA TODAY SportsThere was a clear offensive emphasis by the Bears with each of their first two draft picks in the 2019 NFL Draft. After some necessary patience, Chicago finally went with defense when they selected former Kansas State cornerback Duke Shelley at No. 205 overall in the sixth round. Contrary to popular belief, it did not have to be a pick from Alaska Wesleyan. It was a selection people were actually aware of!Let’s grade the Bears’ addition of Shelley in the sixth round. Grade: BShelley is the first glimpse we have of a cornerback that new defensive coordinator Chuck Pagano prefers at Halas Hall. As someone who would be rightfully described as a defensive back guru with his extensive background from Cleveland to Baltimore, Pagano assuredly had a lot of input into Shelley’s selection. The veteran coach has oft-discussed how much pride he takes in individually mentoring and coaching players, especially cornerbacks. Shelley should expect to hear a lot of both Pagano and new secondary coach Deshea Townsend in his ear. You can do much worse than these two as your mentors. A smaller player at a generous 5-foot-9, 181 pounds, Shelley theoretically could be in the mix at nickel cornerback for the Bears. In a very ideal world, he’s eventually pushing veteran Buster Skrine for playing time and becoming Chicago’s slot defensive back of the future. However, during Shelley’s last collegiate season he only played 10 snaps in the slot while mostly featuring on the left boundary. The ledger shows he actually has minimal experience playing inside, even if his athletic profile and fit with the Bears maintains he could shine there. If Chicago brass plans to have Shelley make a transition toward nickel cornerback, they have to understand there’s going to be a bit of an adjustment period before he has his sea legs under him. To their credit, the Bears wouldn’t use a pre-draft top-30 visit on Shelley if they didn’t have confidence and patience in what he can become. Shelley is someone who would’ve reportedly had a fourth-round grade at Halas Hall but fell due to a toe injury in his last year with the Wildcats. The Bears may believe they have the makings of a draft “steal” on their hands.Overall, Shelley is a savvy and instinctive player who needs polish at a new granted position before he can take on some of the league’s best offensive slot weapons. Regardless of how the Bears feel at this present moment, Shelley more realistically carves out a career as a special teams contributor and depth player than anyone making an impact as a regular starter. Keep in mind that crazier things have happened in an individual prospect’s development on the fringes. Fortunately for Shelley’s sake, he seems adept to making a transition to the inside if you’re optimistic in his outlook. The polished and experienced player with 31 pass deflections and eight interceptions in four seasons changes direction seamlessly in coverage. He’s a physical grinder and tough competitor. There are no easy yards or plays in direct opposition to Shelley. If that description sounds familiar to any recent Bears’ nickel cornerbacks like Bryce Callahan or Cre’Von LeBlanc, it’s because the comparisons are more than apt. The Bears’ secondary depth is thin and unproven until further notice. With any luck Womens Sherrick McManis Jersey , Shelley might soon become someone Pagano and company can rely on. As a sellout crowd at Soldier Field cheered the Bears against the Buccaneers on September 26, 1993, one seat in the northeast corner remained empty. A ticket was purchased for section 26, row 19, seat 38, but no one sat there. The seat was draped only with a wreath of Bird of Paradise flowers.The display was in memory of Annie Armstrong, the mother of Buccaneers tight end Tyji Armstrong, who had suffered a fatal heart attack there one year earlier, October 18, 1992, and died later that day. She was in town from Michigan with family to watch her son.After that, every time Armstrong played at Soldier Field, he purchased the ticket for that seat, along with the other eight next to it for the Armstrong clan there that day. As NFC Central rivals, the Bucs and Bears played twice a year. Indeed, Armstrong bought that seat and laid out flowers in 1993, 1994 and 1995. He did it again in 1996 with the Cowboys and in 1998 with the Rams.And indeed, at some point in each TV broadcast Charles Leno Jersey , or at least for those Bears-Bucs games, the announcers discussed Armstrong and his mother. They showed the empty seat. They showed the flowers.“When we left (Chicago last year), I was thinking, ‘I’ve got to come back every year,’” Armstrong said in September of 1993, leading up to his first game back at Soldier Field after his mother’s passing. “I try not to think about it. I just hope I don’t freak out.”In the midst of an NFL game, there were not a lot of reasons to put the camera on Armstrong. The 6’4, 260-pound tight end caught only 16 passes his first two years combined, grabbed 22 in his third year and 15 for the remainder of his NFL career. He spent his time in Tampa as TE2. He scored three NFL touchdowns, one per season from 1992 to 1994. He made more news for fines and fights than catches and highlights.That anonymity made his story more striking. If he was a star, he would be discussed at length for any number of plays, to which the announcers would at some point add his mother’s story as a veritable footnote. Instead, the broadcast would halt and the cameras would find him and the announcers would tell the story of October 18, 1992.This was a family reunion for the 1992 3rd round pick, his mother and other family members coming in from Michigan to see Tyji play. Before the game, he spoke and laughed with his mother. She had raised him, and he’d always been closer with her than his father.“He was there financially, but from a father-son standpoint http://www.thebearslockerroom.com/authentic-joel-iyiegbuniwe-jersey , he was never there for me,” Armstrong told the Tampa Bay Times in August of ‘93. “Basically, I grew up in a one-parent family.”With his father’s death before the 1992 draft, and with only four half-siblings, Armstrong called his mother “the only family I considered I had.”Just after halftime of that ‘92 Bears-Bucs game, the 51-year-old Mrs. Armstrong clutched her chest. Paramedics arrived, and word made it down from the stands to Buccaneers head coach Sam Wyche, who then had the task of telling this 22-year-old rookie that his mother was being rushed to an ambulance. Upon receiving word in the third quarter, Armstrong changed out of his uniform and followed the team doctor through the tunnels of Soldier Field just in time to see his unconscious mother loaded into an ambulance.He rode with her to Mercy Hospital at 2525 N. Michigan Avenue. She was pronounced dead there at 2:53 p.m.As a rabid, middle school-aged Bears fan, I always took note of these moments when announcers told Armstrong’s story. They were jarringly different than the general tone of any typical televised sports game. Which is not to say that the pall of daily life didn’t seep into broadcasts. In the unending thirst for sports human interest stories, that was actually fairly common. This could be anything from announcers discussing the impact that the Yugoslav Wars had on Vlade Divac to Brian Urlacher or Brett Favre playing after the passing of a parent to a team recovering from the untimely death of a teammate.And yet, all of these instances were framed in an athletic context. “How will a grieving Urlacher rebound against the Saints following his mother’s death?” “Can you believe Favre threw four TDs the night after his dad died?” “The Comets are rallying around memories of their fallen teammate Kim Perrot.” And so on.The Armstrong story was different. It had no athletic connection. It was a human story, first and last. And it was present. Immediate. Active. The empty seat. The flowers. With every Bears-Bucs game of that era, the stands of Soldier Field bore the mark of Annie Armstrong’s life and death. Those games carried both the specter of mortality and the spirit of eternity. Pain and love. Heartbreak and hope.This was made more memorable by the otherwise colorless Bears-Bucs games of the era. From the ‘83 season to the first game of ‘96, the Bears and Buccaneers met 27 times. The Bears won 23. We swept the series every year from ‘83 to ‘88, winning 12 straight games. After Tampa swept us in our flukey-bad 1989 campaign, we ripped off runs of four- and five-straight wins against the ever-doomed Buccaneers.The scores were lopsided too. We held Tampa under 10 points nine times Womens Nick Kwiatkoski Jersey , and held them at or below two touchdowns another nine times. We dropped 40 on them thrice. The day Annie Armstrong died, the Bears won 31-14. The day her son placed that wreath on that seat for the first time, the Bears won 47-17.There would be so much more to discuss other than Armstrong if he played for a strong team of the era — the 49ers, Giants, Washington — or if he played for a deeper rival, like the Packers.Instead, the one-sided nature of the bi-annual meetings made the flowers on the late Mrs. Armstrong’s seat a reprieve from both the series’ banality and the sport’s brutality. I of course watched nearly every Bears game with my family when I was growing up. Suddenly, once per season, the sport I loved brought me a message of true life-and-death perspective. Even at that age, I was aware enough to empathize with the pain of this man I’d never met who played for a team for which I did not root.Even at that age, I was grateful for the perspective borne of that reprieve, a newfound understanding of why we root and what matters most.“She wasn’t conscious when I got to her under the stands,” Armstrong said in the 1993 Tampa Bay Times interview. “But thank God we talked before the game. We laughed and joked. We were really tight. I really don’t know if she knew I was there (in the ambulance), but I knew she would want me to keep going on no matter what.”This Sunday, the Bears host the Buccaneers for only the fifth time since the league expanded to 32 teams in 2002 and re-aligned the divisions, sending the Bucs to the newly formed NFC South and free of our twice-a-year bond. I don’t know if Tyji Armstrong will be watching this game. I know he’ll be thinking of his mother. That makes two of us.---Jack M Silverstein is Windy City Gridiron’s Bears historian, and author of “How The GOAT Was Built: 6 Life Lessons From the 1996 Chicago Bulls.” He is the proprietor of Chicago sports history Instagram “A Shot on Ehlo.” Say hey at @readjack.