Spoken like a true not Bears fan. 8)
Fair. Let me ask you this then.
What should the Bears have done, then? First overall pick, what should they have done with that pick?
To me, the options are:
1) Draft a QB. This essentially says that the Justin Fields experiment is a failure and they're starting over- even if it's not meant that way, it's how it would come across to any observer, Fields included.
2) Draft at a different position. QBs are the meat of this draft, and any other position player is probably not going until after the top... call it five? In which case, using the #1 pick to take a #6 player means you could have traded down and gotten more out of that pick, and didn't.
3) Trade down, let someone else grab the QB you didn't want/need anyway, reap the rewards of their insistence.
I don't know what the Bears' draft will look like, and I doubt even after the draft ends we'll have a real picture of how well they did for a few years, until those players have had enough time to sink or swim. But based on what they got out of this, as of today at least, this looks like an absolute win for them- possibly for the Panthers as well, depending on how well they do at developing their next QB (Stroud?).