5 Chicago Bears Who Won't Be Back in 2024

The Chicago Bears had a rollercoaster of a 2023 season. Things started so poorly everyone began to wonder if Matt Eberflus was going to make it through his first season as an NFL head coach. But the team tightened up down the stretch, especially on the defensive side of the ball, and gave everybody a glimpse of hope.

After losing the first four games of the season Chicago ended up going 7-6 the rest of the year, which is frankly pretty ideal from a team-building standpoint. The Bears were bad enough to keep a top-10 pick in the 2024 NFL Draft but showed enough to suggest that they could be competitive next season. Maybe not yet playoff competitive, but certainly better than they've been since the end of the Mitch Trubisky era.

Now they've got the No. 1 pick in the draft thanks to last year's trade with the Carolina Panthers, their own pick at No. 8 overall, and the third-most cap space in the NFL. The Bears are very well set up to transform their team this offseason, which will mean a lot of changes up and down the roster. Those changes have already begun to take shape, with the team cutting Eddie Jackson and Cody Whitehair earlier this month.

Who else won't be back with the Bears in 2024?

Darnell Mooney

Mooney received something of an outsized degree of hype after his 2023 season. That was largely because his flashes of great play were often the only bright spots during Bears games since he was drafted in 2020. But he never really managed to put it together outside of a standout 2021 and this past season was a bad one for the former fifth-round pick. Mooney recorded career-lows across the board, putting up 31 catches for 414 yards and one touchdown in 15 games with a truly concerning 50.8 percent catch percentage. His biggest highlight was dropping a Hail Mary against the Browns in December.

It probably doesn't fall all on Mooney. Justin Fields has notably struggled to pass the ball, the Bears as a whole struggled to function offensively, and Mooney was competing with DJ Moore for targets. He's only two years removed from a 1,000-yard season. But he's a free agent and it does not seem likely Chicago will spend money to retain him. His production can easily be replicated with a low draft pick, and that path comes with the added benefit of potentially finding a diamond in the rough. Maybe there's a productive receiver somewhere in Mooney but Chicago is not where he's going to find it.