Rahimi, Harris & Grote Show - Matt Chatham breaks down what Bears fans can expect from new center Garrett Bradbury

Episode Date: March 9, 2026

Leila Rahimi, Marshall Harris and Mark Grote were joined by former Patriots linebacker and Super Bowl champion Matt Chatham to share a scouting report on new Bears center Garrett Bradbury, whom Chicago acquired in a trade with New England.

Rahimi Harrison Grody. I'm not a fan of any team. I'm just a fan of being right. Middays 10 to 2 on 104 3, the score. What does the season mean to you? Yeah, just a lot. It's been a fun group to go work with, for sure. How surprising was this sort of offensive performance

compared to maybe what you were expecting after the last of the weeks? Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Surprising is the right word. certainly didn't do a good enough job. It hurts, so try and learn from it and move on.

That was Garrett Bradbury, who is the new center for the Bears after the Super Bowl lost to Seattle. This is Rahimi Harrison Grotie on 104-3 The Score. And for more on Garrett Bradbury, we go to our hotline and also we go to Twitch. Twitch.tv.tv.tv.tv.tv.tv.tv.tv.tv.com. That is where we find friend of the show. he is a former Patriots linebacker three-time Super Bowl champion. The owner of Rub Smok Love

Premium MeatRubs and Seasons Visit rubsmokelov.com. It is Matt Chatham. Matt, thanks for joining us. Good to be with you. I think for us, the first place to start is, number one, you know, as you observing this Patriot season, which was successful outside of that Super Bowl L,

this is a guy in Garrick Bradbury who consistently was there. You know, every single snap of the regular season. He was there in every game. How much do you look to that consistency is something that we can look forward to here observing him with the Bears? I would say more of my experience from playing than the media years, there's always a type like Garrett on good teams. And that's usually the guy that, you know, maybe it was more heralded earlier in his career. His first round pick originally played for an extended period of time for that team, has made money in the league. And then another

team gets him when it is apparent that he's still got, you know, tread on the tires. But he's not going to come in and necessarily make Pro Bowls or anything like that, but he's just going to be steady, dependable. And like you mentioned, he's going to play 17 games. So he's kind of the guy that, oddly enough, you see when a free agent comes to a place that has, you know, had a coaching change and they're sort of looking for their leaders, a guy from the outside that immediately was a podium guy right off the bat. You know, someone that the organization trusts enough to basically give their message week in, week out and be the guy they put in front of the microphone in the cameras. So that's

very telling with him as well. The other thing I would say about Garrett's performance during the year, other than the Super Bowl, which they got a lot of flack earned for pocket pressure up the middle, he was a kind of guy we just didn't talk about much, which is usually a good sign. It's not like, oh, this one's, you know, they hit home run on this free agent or this one really stock. Garrett was really consistent, but unspectacular. And I think that's at the price point we're talking in the stage of career, that's really what you're hoping you're getting Chicago. Matt, as we look at Garrett, I think we're all trying to figure out just how good he is, because

again, last year the Bears went out and got the best free agent center that was available and Drew Dalman, only got a year out of him. And now you're wondering, okay, looking at his time in the NFL, what can we expect? Is it more of what we saw in Minnesota? Is it more of New England? But I think because of the guards who he's playing in between, he should be adequate. But I don't know if adequate is the right word or not. Tell me what you see here.

I always kind of cringe a little bit with sort of evaluation of players, as if anything non-pro bowler is sort of a problem. And it really doesn't work that way, in my view, as long as you win your matchup, play after play, you're going to be a net positive. And I think he's that kind of player. I think the other thing you also look for is when he hit the 29th and 30th year, those are the years in which you're logging games, right?

It's different when a guy, you know, puts, his first six or seven together makes all the starts, and then all of a sudden later, you're going to miss a few games each year, and then now you're doing a new contract and go, oh, gosh, can he pull it back to how he once was? I think with Gareth, again, look at type beyond just his sort of demo. He's also a 6-3-300 guy, and we know in the NFL, the centers aren't always the biggest guys on the offensive line. So he's not going to be, I mean, if you're hoping Chicago to sort of dominate down the middle of the pocket,

as far as really pressing it forward and giving Caleb all the room in the world to work, he may not be that guy. You're certainly not going to run the ball between the guards and just blow people off the line. He's a 6-3-300, not a huge and overwhelmingly powerful guy. But he always grades really well in Passbro. He fronts his guy up. And he's a great communicator. He runs things.

He's going to be now playing next to Joe Tuny, who he's obviously very familiar with Joe from the NC State days. So he's just not going to screw up. And he's going to, by and large, do what you expect of him. But again, when you're not spending 10, you know, like open market free agency, kind of dollars in the center, 10, 10 men. or more, something like that, and you're not using a first round or second round pick on it. That's what you really hope to get. You know, you're going to get something stable, and I think that's what they've got.

Yeah, I mean, he's affordable, and he would have been affordable for New England, too. Is the only reason the Patriots are not keeping him? Is that Jared Wilson, whom they drafted in the third round, is either center? 100%. All he played in college was center, and then he came over, and because of the Garrett edition, it was sort of, the safety pick, right? And, again, this is something you usually see throughout the course of, you know, NFL season or roster to roster. They have a high value guy they like as possibly the center,

but center men have been a real problem two seasons ago for the Patriots. So Garrett's sort of like the insurance and not a super high dollar insurance at that state of his career. And then, you know, Jared Davis can come in and, you know, oh gosh, he looks like he maybe has the flexibility to play another position while Garrett sort of stabilizes things. But then you see, yeah, you know, Jared himself had a little bit of rough play, you know, down the stretch. And you might just look at your off-season thing and go, hey, you know what? He may be more comfortable with his old position, and it's great to have a guy in a rookie contract as opposed to even a not-so-exensive guy that came here as a free agent.

So they also have another guy on their roster named Ben Brown, who was an undrafted free agent. I know rosters love this when you eventually find a guy that in his second and third season starts to sort of the competency, especially in times of other injuries where he steps in and plays at the same level, kind of give you the confidence that, hey, man, we don't need to go spend a first or a second or high dollar for agency to find our left guard. Maybe we have him and Jared can slide over to center. And that makes a guy like Garrett a little more expendable. So I think it generally isn't just fit on particular roster.

Maybe more valuable to another team than it is to your particular situation here. We're talking to Matt Chatham. He is the former Patriots linebacker, a three-time Super Bowl champion and friend of the show here on Rahimi Harrison Grotie on 104-3, the score. And Matt, is somebody who would have to face an offensive line like this as a linebacker. when you hear about that consistency like we mentioned, for example, or when you know that Caleb Williams and I brought this up too, we'll be going into his second season under Ben Johnson's offense, his third overall.

You saw what Bradbury was able to do with Drake May. How hard would that be as a linebacker to just know you've got an experienced center up front, somebody who's got a lot of at least a year more of experience now as a quarterback, and that exchange potentially helping and just making it hard from a defensive standpoint? point. I think the thing that you would want, you know, from the defensive side of the ball, looking back across, is a center that gets overwhelmed by push. You know, if any nose over him or any tackles, can pocket push and really put him into the pocket so you know you're always going to be flushed. But if you're solid up front and you don't get into confusion element,

and I think that's something that when you want, I think Caleb Williams is probably more of the guy you don't want leaving the pocket. You'd love to close the phone booth around him. So, you know, you just don't want a guy who blows calls, you know, from the center position, any kind of confusion about who's coming and who's not. That can often be on his plate. But, again, I just don't think Garrett's that guy. I don't think Garrett's a guy who's going to make mistakes, and that's why he's so valued. And he's the kind of guy that, you know, provided this continued health is with him,

could play until 35. He just has always sort of been that steady, always there, always doing the right thing, never dominating, but the kind of guy you'd love to have on your roster. Making the calls, Matt, is something that we talked about immediately when Drew Dalman is gone. He retires. You're like, well, is Caleb going to have more responsibility? What do you see as the progression of that, the quarterback taking more responsibility for the offense? Is that something?

Because you've seen it with the same quarterback class, Drake May. When do quarterbacks generally take that step and how important is that? Or maybe it's not as important as we think it is. Yeah. That's stuff for me, from my offensive line of friends. Of course, that's not my universe, but it tends to be more, it tends to be more from a coordinator standpoint. Coordinators often will have systems that dictate that the line of the ones are going to make that call. They'd rather have the center to make that call and put more on the quarterback's plate.

There's others that expect the quarterback to be a doctorate. And, you know, he can call every part of the segmented portion in a call. And he needs to know the front and pointing out the mic and, you know, turning protections and sending backs all on his own. And some don't make them do that. So I don't necessarily say, hey, once you've progressed a certain point, point than the quarterback should. Some systems just simply don't ask that of the quarterback ever. You know, you may go through 15 years in the league and never have had to do that. I think Cam Newton has spoken about this extensively where Cam had gotten here late late in his

career and had never done that before. It wasn't because he hadn't progressed. I mean, he'd been an MVP. So it's just, I think it's more system dependent upon, you know, how much they want to ask of the quarterback to do that. Everybody okay in New England? Has everything sort of settled? I mean, I don't even know, like, the reaction, like, having, you lose the Super Bowl, You got to the Super Bowl, which is awesome. Weren't expected to win it, but how's everything in New England? I think our bigger concern now is snowfall, you know, two feet. We don't get this here, right?

So I worked for a couple seasons at the Big Ten Network. So I was here at Nesson and I would fly midweek to Chicago all the time. And I'm telling you the difference between, hey, it's kind of cold here. It's, you know, 20, maybe it gets down to 10 occasionally. And you get a little snowfall between getting off that plane in Chicago and having to be maybe 10 or 15 degrees cooler and then much more snowfall that stays for four and five months. That's not something we experience here.

So, yeah, I mean, they played in the Gravy Bowl. I mean, it was all extra. Yeah, that's what I wondered, yeah. Yeah, we're just, you know, we're entertained to be here. It was great. It sucks. They didn't finish it off, but it's one of the youngest rosters in a league, brand new head coach, sky's the limit.

Hey, what's next? Well, for us, next was snow, and that's probably the part. That's probably the part we're more disappointed in it. Next, snow. And a bunch of money under the cap for the Patriots, which makes a day like today really exciting. DJ Moore, though, did get traded to the division. You know, there's that piece of it as well in Buffalo.

Yeah, interestingly enough, I mean that Stefan Diggs, I would say Stefan and DJ are comparable players. They're really intermediate route runners. They're pretty efficient. Catch the ball well. But then when that last team made the move, their role had diminished a little bit. So maybe there's a resurgence opportunity there for DJ.

I don't know, but I think, you know, the way this would be digested locally is, okay, the bills didn't go out and sort of spend top of marketing, get an air quote, you know, number one kind of thing. They got a guy who's had many, many thousand yards seasons. He can be that kind of player, hasn't been recently. So it's more a question mark of where he'll be. I think generally in this division, if, you know, you don't see sort of that go get the top dollar free agent once free agency, you know, window opens, then that's probably seen as, okay, well, they're not swinging for the fences. I think that would have also been digested that way here if they'd have retained Stefan Diggs and not tried for something,

you know, a little bit younger, maybe a higher, higher part, you know, higher or sealing part of his career now. So I think we're all kind of shopping in the same neighborhood right now until we see otherwise. Well, Matt Chapman, always great to talk to you. Matt Chatham, the former Patriots linebacker, three-time Super Bowl champion. Matt Chatham is also the owner of Rub, Rub Smoke Love, Premium rubs and Seasonsings available on rubbsmock.com. There is gold bark, beefcake, and gold bark, bold. Yeah, so we enjoy checking that out as well. And Matt is on Twitter at Chatham 58 in case you want to check them out there.

Thanks as always for joining us, Matt. Thanks, guys. That is Matt Chatham, the former Patriots linebacker. Coming up next year on Rahimi Harrison Grotie on 1043, the score. As much as we've talked about Center, as much as we've talked about how nobody under safety right now is under contract for next year. Brad Biggs brought up something else that I wasn't even thinking about. So let's think about it together next.