The Chicago Bears have a new situation to monitor at training camp after one of their brightest young offensive stars missed their second practice this week.
According to ESPN’s Courtney Cronin, the Bears didn’t have second-year running back Kyle Monangai on the practice field during the open-to-media portion of their second camp practice on Thursday, July 30. The team did not provide a reason for his absence.
Monangai was the only Bears player not currently on one of their injury lists who did not participate in their latest practice, sparking both curiosity and cautious concern for the 24-year-old’s status. He is entering his second season in line to split touches in the backfield with veteran D’Andre Swift after rushing for 783 yards as a rookie in 2025.
The concerns about Monangai will fizzle if he returns to practice on either Friday or Saturday before closing out their first week of camp, but consecutive absences would certainly raise the panic meter about his condition unless the Bears explain it away.
Kyle Monangai Injury Would Be Bad News for Bears
There is nothing more than speculation at this point about why Monangai missed the Bears’ latest practice. If it is an injury, though, the team has a problem on its hands.
Monangai projects to play a significant role for the Bears’ offense again in 2026 after forming a two-headed attack with Swift in 2025 that paced Chicago to the third-best rushing offense in the league. While he primarily operated in a change-of-pace role as a rookie, he also flashed his lead-back potential with multiple 100-plus-yard games.
What would be more problematic about an injury for Monangai, though, is how ill-equipped the Bears currently are to replace him as the No. 2 back in their lineup.
Swift has averaged more than 1,000 rushing yards over his last three seasons and is more than capable of holding things down as the workhorse out of the backfield, but the Bears would be lacking complementary options without Monangai. Roschon Johnson is the next most prominent on the roster, but he played just four snaps on offense in 2025.
Meanwhile, the rest of the team’s running backs — Brittain Brown, Salvon Ahmed and undrafted rookie Coleman Bennett — have something to prove in camp before any of them make sense to make the initial 53-man roster, leaving Chicago without fallbacks.
In other words, expect the Bears to re-evaluate the free-agent pool of running backs if it turns out that Monangai missed practice with an injury and needs some time to recover.
Bears Working Toward Clean Bill of Health in Camp
While Monangai’s new absence caught some attention, the Bears have also had several other key players notably absent from their first few practices of camp due to injuries.
Coming into camp, the Bears placed cornerback Kyler Gordon, defensive tackle Shemar Turner, left tackle Ozzy Trapilo, linebackers Keyshaun Elliott (rookie) and Noah Sewell and safety Elijah Hicks on the active/physically unable to perform (PUP) lists. They also added starting linebacker T.J. Edwards to the active/non-football injury (NFI) list.
Some of those absences are expected. Trapilo is recovering from rupturing his patellar tendon in his knee in January during the team’s wild-card playoff win over the Green Bay Packers at home and will likely miss the majority of the 2026 campaign as a result. Sewell is also working back from a late-December Achilles tear that ended his season.
In Gordon’s case, though, the Bears have acknowledged that they are “frustrated” that their $40 million slot cornerback isn’t on the field with them to begin camp. He had missed most of the team’s offseason workout program with the same soft-tissue injury to his calf and is coming off a season in which injuries limited him to just three games.
Players who begin camp on the PUP or NFI lists are eligible to return as soon as the team medically clears them, but Gordon’s situation bears watching in the month ahead.
Bears Star Mysteriously Misses Practice, Sparking New Concerns