The Bears may have stumbled onto a very different answer to their pass-rush problem.
All offseason, Chicago fans have kept circling the same complaint: where’s the help off the edge, and why hasn’t Ryan Poles done more to shore up the defensive end depth? Montez Sweat, Austin Booker and the rest can only carry so much, and the need was there months ago.
Now, though, a rookie sixth-round pick is starting to change the conversation. Jordan van den Berg, a defensive tackle out of Georgia Tech, has been turning heads in camp and carried that momentum into his preseason debut against the Cleveland Browns.
What makes van den Berg interesting is that he isn’t solving the problem in the usual way. The Bears may not be getting outside pressure from another edge rusher, but they might be finding it from the interior instead. He’s still raw, but the early signs are loud enough to make people take notice.
Against Cleveland, van den Berg played 15 snaps and finished with three quarterback pressures. The tape backed it up, too. His athleticism stood out snap after snap, the kind that jumps off the screen once you start watching closely.
That burst should not be a total shock to anyone who followed him before the 2026 NFL Draft. Van den Berg posted a perfect 10.00 Relative Athletic Score, second all-time only to Jordan Davis, with minor differences in scoring.
Numbers like that can sound impressive in a vacuum. Seeing them translate on the field is a different story, and that’s exactly what happened in his preseason debut.
His final college season at Georgia Tech offered another hint. Van den Berg finished with 29 quarterback pressures.
That number becomes even more striking next to two of the biggest names in this year’s defensive tackle class. Kayden McDonald had 10 pressures in his final season, while Peter Woods had 14.
So for a sixth-round pick to outpace both by that margin is eye-opening. It also fits the picture Bears fans have been seeing throughout camp and in the preseason.
No one is penciling van den Berg in for 15.0 sacks. But there’s clearly a path where he gives Chicago 5.0 to 10.0 in a season, and that kind of interior disruption would matter a lot for a defense that badly needs it.
The hope is still for Booker to take a leap and land somewhere between 8.0 and 12.0 sacks, while Sweat, in a perfect world, finishes with 12.0 or more. That wouldn’t make the Bears one of the league’s best pass-rush units, but it would give them real production from the edges and a useful boost from the middle.
Van den Berg looks like he can be a problem for offenses from the inside. If he keeps getting opportunities, the Bears may have found both a long-term piece on the line and an unexpected way to patch a hole that had been left open.
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