After a long day at the media festivities on the opening day of the Super Bowl week in Las Vegas, I’m typing this installment of the newsletter with less than four hours until its regularly scheduled publishing time.

My feet are howling; my recorder is full of good stuff, and somehow, even despite the 1,758 miles that separate Soldier Field from Allegiant Stadium, there was plenty of Chicago Bears conversation today.

“You look at some of the adversity he’s been through, and it’s not easy in Chicago. It’s gonna make him tougher. Whether he stays there or goes somewhere else, I know he’s very resilient.”

Former Chicago Bears head coach Matt Nagy was grilled on his feelings regarding Justin Fields, the quarterback he coached during his rookie season in the NFL in 2021. As rough as things ended for Nagy in Chicago, he doesn’t seem to have an ill word to say about his one-time rookie signal caller.

“You have to learn and grow from those experiences, and I think he’s done that,” Nagy said Monday night. “Some guys do it faster than others, but I know one thing’s for sure: He’s going the right way with his growth, and that’s important.

While Nagy’s answers regarding Fields were very surface level — which is to be expected — it seems that he believes that Fields can still reach the ceiling that his former boss, Ryan Poles, and himself saw in Fields when the Bears traded up to draft Fields in 2021.

But enjoying his second consecutive Super Bowl experience since being dismissed by the Bears isn’t going to bash Justin Fields. So, if you were expecting such a response, you’re out of luck. This means, at the same time, his responses were what they were: a Super Bowl media night answer. It's not really one that moves the needle for me when it comes to evaluating Fields’ body of work and what he could be capable of in the future, wherever that may be.

But Nagy wasn’t alone on Monday night. San Francisco 49ers tight end George Kittle, who grew up a Bears fan, had this to say about The Great Quarterback Debate of Chicago:

“Wow, this is putting me on the spot,” Kittle replied when asked what the Bears should do with the No. 1 overall pick in the NFL Draft. “I think what the Bears should do is trade back as many picks as they can and build around a guy that they’ve been trying to build around.”

However, it wasn’t all Justin Fields love on Monday in Vegas. On the Pat McAfee Show, ESPN’s Adam Schefter said that the consensus around the league is that the Bears will select Caleb Williams with the first pick in the draft in April.

“There are a few issues with this,” Schefter said. “Number one, are the Bears going to be willing to move on from taking Caleb Williams, which I believe seems to be the widespread consensus around the league: that Caleb Williams will be the No. 1 pick.”

ESPN’s Dan Orlovsky also said that he believes that’s the most prudent route for the Bears this spring: “Justin Fields showed a lot this year, but I think Quarterback is the right choice at number one for the Bears.”

And in case you were wondering, teams have already begun doing their homework on Caleb Williams off the field. His college coach Lincoln Riley said yesterday on McAfee that “quite a few teams” have reached out to him “who wanna know about Caleb Williams and what type of leader he is.” You can bet that the Bears are one of those teams.

Riley also squashed the erroneous reports that Williams doesn’t want to play in Chicago.

“All Caleb Williams cares about is winning, and he wants to help a franchise be successful … He’s very low-key about it all, and the team that he has around him is very low maintenance … He’s about the right things, and he’s gonna make an NFL team very happy.”

Why the Patriot Way doesn’t translate to success outside of Foxboro.

I’ve always wondered why the “Patriot Way,” and more specifically now that he’s departed Foxboro, the Belichick way, never seems to translate outside New England. I asked Las Vegas Raiders wide receiver Jakobi Meyers in a conversation with him and quarterback Aidan O’Connell on Monday morning.

“I would say that [the Patriots under Bill Belichick] is more about building soldiers and the team than the business of it,” Meyers said. “Yeah, they probably don’t want to pay people, but they also want their players to be tough and together, whereas, in other places, people want their money, probably don’t want to work as hard to get to that level because they’ve seen teams win in other ways, where the Patriots only won their way, and they’ll only do it their way. With the Patriots, you have to try to convince them that there’s more than one way to win, and the Patriots are trying to convince everyone that their way is the only way to win.”

What I took from that is that the “Patriot Way” really was the “Belichick Way.” Bill Belichick controlled the Patriots’ roster and personnel for most of his tenure in New England and ruled with an iron, one-track fist. It was Bill’s way or the highway.

This is fine when you have Tom Brady at quarterback for much of that run and can assemble a team around him that can compete for Super Bowls year after year for a prolonged period. Everything aligned in New England for a long time, and Bill’s way worked. Until it didn’t, and within three years, the Belichick way had grown stale to the point of separation.

So, when Belichick disciples like Josh McDaniels try to take the “Patriot Way” on the road, it just doesn’t work. Because they’re not Bill, they don’t have Tom Brady, and as Meyers — who spent three seasons in New England with Belichick before signing with Vegas last spring — pointed out correctly, there are multiple ways to win in this league. And probably never more so than the present, so being as one-track-minded as Bill Belichick in the modern-day NFL isn’t a recipe for success. Hence his departure, the repeated failures of his top assistants as head coaches, and the fact that seven NFL teams passed on him during this hiring cycle.

Aidan O’Connell is ready to compete with anyone the Raiders bring in this offseason at quarterback.

I asked O’Connell what he thought of the likelihood that the Raiders would bring in another quarterback to compete with him in 2024. O’Connell said he’s never had a starting job that he didn’t have to fight for, so the competition is nothing new to him.

“I think it’s part of it,” O’Connell said. “I’ve been competing since I started playing the game. There haven’t been many years where I was the starter going in, so it’ll be nothing new for me. Even when you’re not competing with someone else, you’ve still got to win the job, win the right to be there and be the quarterback.”

O’Connell and Meyers got a chuckle out of the Raiders locker room having Chiefs’ signage plastered all over it this week.

I told them that the Raiders locker room at Allegiant Stadium was decorated in vinyl Kansas City Chiefs logos, and the two had a very mature response.

“They didn’t have to do that!” O’Connell laughed. “They earned it, they deserve it, so we gotta live with it.”

“It’s alright, we’re going to see them again,” Meyers said with a smirk.

Chase Young said he took his lack of effort personally last week, but is that good enough for the 49ers?

"We can't have that. I can't have that,” Young said on Monday night when asked about a lack of effort in last week’s victory over the Lions in the NFC title game. “We’re going to do our best to make sure that doesn’t happen again.”

The lapse in effort by Young has been a central taking point since that game, but I got the feeling that it wasn’t nearly as big of a concern when I spoke with 49ers DC Steve Wilks on Monday night.

“He adds another element of rushing the passer,” Wilks said when I asked him what Young brought to the table in San Francisco after the trade in October. “He came in and really adjusted to the culture that we had in place, adapted well and quickly, and I think he’s doing a good job for us.”

I asked Wilks what his biggest concern was in creating a gameplan to stop the Chiefs on Sunday, particularly Patrick Mahomes, and his ability to extend plays and wreak havoc on even the best gameplans.

“I think that’s the key,” Wilks said. “It’s hard to really prepare against what I call ‘the second play within one.’ When [Mahomes] starts trying to extend the play, you’ve got to do a great job with trying to contain him, and you’ve got to do a great job on the back end trying to stick with those receivers and trying to close those windows.”

As for who the biggest threat to the 49ers is outside of Mahomes, no surprise it’s Travis Kelce:

“It’s Kelce,” Wilks said without hesitation. “The chemistry that they have together, I don’t want to call it ad-libbed, but when they extend the play, man, they just seem to be on the exact same page.”

The Bulls are back in action tonight, hosting the Minnesota Timberwolves at the United Center. Tip-off is set for 7 PM CT, and you can catch the action on NBC Sports Chicago.