Bears camp opens with defensive front already banged up

Bears training camp is barely a day old and Chicago's defense already has two names missing from the depth chart. Adam Schefter reported the team placed defensive end Montez Sweat on the Active/Non-Football Illness list, while defensive back Elijah Hicks landed on the Active/Physically Unable to Perform list.

For a fanbase that's spent the offseason talking itself into this defense, seeing Sweat's name on any injury-adjacent list is a gut check, even a minor one. He's the guy Chicago traded a 2024 second-round pick for and then locked up with a 4-year, $98 million extension that made him one of the highest-paid edge rushers in football. That's not a rotational piece — that's the anchor of the pass rush.

The NFI designation specifically means it's unrelated to football activity, which typically points to an illness rather than a lingering injury. Reporting out of Chicago has since indicated Sweat's absence was short-lived, costing him little more than the opening practice before he was ticketed to return to the field. Camp overreactions are a genre unto themselves, and this looks like it's trending toward a non-story fast.

Hicks landing on PUP is the more routine of the two moves, but it still thins out a secondary that was already going to be under a microscope after last season. He's not a household name outside Chicago, but depth pieces matter in a division that features Justin Jefferson, Jordan Love, and whatever Detroit's receiver room looks like on a given Sunday.

None of this changes the macro picture for the Bears defense, which is still built around Sweat as the headline free-agent-caliber addition and a young supporting cast trying to prove last year's improvement was real. But day 1 news like this is a reminder that camp health reports are going to be a running storyline all August, and Chicago just opened the account with two names on it.