There’s a quote you’ll see a lot over the next few days as you witness the fallout from the Bears signing Ray McDonald.

Asked Tuesday night at the NFL owners meetings if he consulted his mother, Virginia, Chicago Bears chairman George McCaskey said:

“We talked about it, had a good discussion about it. In fairness to her, as in fairness to Ray, I don’t want to talk about the particulars of the conversation. But in the end, she put her trust in me and I’m putting my trust in Ryan.”

In a vacuum, that quote from McCaskey appears to put this entire decision on Ryan Pace, the Bears’ new general manager, who McCaskey and team president Ted Phillips hired just over two months ago.

A lot of people will come to that conclusion, but it appears to me that conclusion is wrong.

There’s two dynamics going on here with the decision to sign McDonald, an above-average 3-4 defensive end/tackle who was fired by the San Francisco 49ers in December after being accused of sexual assault.

On one hand, we have Ray McDonald the football player. On the other, we have Ray McDonald the human being. By hiring McDonald as an employee of the Chicago Bears, both the football player and human being now represent the franchise, which is why both versions needed to be thoroughly evaluated before making the hire.

As the man who makes personnel decisions, one might assume it would be Pace’s job to evaluate both Ray McDonald the football player and Ray McDonald the human being and make the final call.

But as we learned from McCaskey Tuesday, that wasn’t the case here.

McCaskey has maintained that his general manager has final say over personnel decisions, except in the case of character issues. That’s a big exception. The chairman admitted Tuesday that “there have only been three instances since I’ve been chairman where I’ve gotten involved in a player personnel decision. One was (releasing) Sam Hurd. The second was (acquiring) Brandon Marshall. The third was Ray McDonald.”

In other words, McCaskey is the one responsible for making the call on McDonald the human being, not Pace. That makes the chairman just as responsible for this signing, if not more.

“Ryan had asked me for permission to pursue him,” McCaskey said, via the Chicago Tribune’s transcript. “And we had a file on him with the information that we had gathered (on the legal issues) and I looked at the file and came back and said no. So Ryan said, ‘Fine. We’ll move on to the next guy.’”

That’s important. Pace was OK moving on.

So what changed?

McCaskey’s opinion on the matter changed. McDonald funded his own ticket to Chicago for a two-hour meeting with McCaskey and apparently aced the job interview.

“And after that conversation, I told Ryan that he had our permission (to sign him),” McCaskey said.

At that point, it’s Pace’s job to evaluate McDonald the football player, which includes his impact on the locker room — something that’s never really been in question with the defensive lineman. Defensive coordinator Vic Fangio, who coached McDonald in San Francisco and got the wheels turning on this signing, vouched for his player, as did defensive backs coach Ed Donatell, who also worked on the 49ers staff.

“I think the intimate knowledge that Vic and Ed had helped a lot, helped me feel good about this right now,” Pace told reporters in Arizona.

And from a strictly football standpoint, Pace is making a pretty easy decision. Before Tuesday, the Bears didn’t have a true 3-4 defensive end on their entire roster. In McDonald, he’s getting a proven player who knows Fangio’s system inside-and-out — and he’s getting him at a very cheap price.

“It’s a one-year, prove-it deal,” Pace said.

But obviously there’s more to this signing than just football, which is why Pace sought out approval from above.

“I left the football evaluation entirely to the coaches and the player personnel people,” McCaskey said. “I didn’t want that to be a factor in my decision. I didn’t know that much about him before his name came up, except what I had heard about the incidents while he was a 49er. So his abilities as a football player weren’t really a factor in my decision. For me, it was whether to permit Ryan to pursue him. It’s Ryan’s decision once he has permission whether to go through with pursuing him.”

Pace was given that permission, and since the chairman of the franchise had already decided that signing McDonald was worth the potential negative PR impact it would have on the Bears, the GM was free to look at it like this:

Will McDonald make the defense better? Yes.

Will McDonald be a detriment to the locker room? Probably not.

As a football player, is McDonald worth the current market-value? Absolutely.

Frankly, from a pure-football standpoint, there’s not a whole lot of risk here.

But from a public relations standpoint, there’s a lot of risk. And that’s where McCaskey came in. He made the call.

In fairness, while McDonald has a lengthy list of legal issues attached to his name, he has not been charged with a crime in either the sexual assault case from December nor the domestic violence case from last summer.

Of course, that doesn’t make him innocent, but from the Bears’ standpoint,  it also doesn’t make him guilty. McCaskey made it clear the team’s security did their homework. He also said he talked to McDonald’s parents. And McDonald recommended he talk to his college coach, Urban Meyer.

This is where one might scream “objection!” in the court of public opinion.  McDonald, McDonald’s parents and Urban Meyer aren’t exactly the most objective witnesses to interview. Did McCaskey talk to the alleged victims?

“I didn’t. I don’t want to interfere with any league investigations that might be ongoing,” McCaskey said. “I did speak with a couple people at the league. They couldn’t offer me a lot of information.”

That makes it hard to believe the Bears really had enough information to justify the signing, but whatever occurred in those conversations was obviously enough to make McCaskey believe McDonald did not do what he has been accused of.

But that does not necessarily mean he’s worthy of being hired. At a minimum, McDonald is guilty of making poor decisions. The accuser of domestic violence was his pregnant fiancée. The accuser of sexual assault was a different woman who was allegedly drunk enough that she fell down and hit her head by McDonald’s pool. Despite that, the two later had sex. Now the cops want to know if that sex was consensual.

In January, Pace laid out his criteria for finding football players: “We are acquiring football players that fit the Chicago Bears. There will be a major emphasis on character, toughness, instincts and intelligence.”

Rape or no rape, there’s enough evidence that Ray McDonald did not show good instincts or good intelligence on the night he chose to have sex with a woman allegedly drunk enough to fall and hit her head.

But Pace wasn’t finished with that quote. In the same breath, he continued: “Guys, it’s all about winning games and that’s what I’m here to do.”

Really, that’s the NFL in the nutshell. Like any other team, the Bears have to balance the desire to win with protecting their image.

In this case, the timing is just odd. 2014 was a year where the NFL’s image took a severe hit for the way it handled domestic violence cases. Here in the Chicago, the Bears saw their locker room crumble because of a lack of leadership and an influx of character concerns.

Meanwhile, they won five games. Is Ray McDonald really going to be the key to turning everything around?

Probably not.

But he does fill a need, and McCaskey is one willing to give second chances. Talk to players who play for the McCaskeys and most of them love the family. They love George. They don’t want to let the McCaskeys down.

And based on what we heard from George McCaskey Tuesday, Ray McDonald is no different.

“The pattern. The frequency. Ray and I talked about this,” McCaskey said, referencing McDonald’s long list of legal problems. “I told him that my assessment was ‘bad decision-making,’ allowing himself to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, or not withdrawing from a situation at the appropriate time. And I told him, if he’s to remain a Bear, that needs to improve. And he pledged to me that it would.”

That pledge led to the chairman giving the GM permission to make the hire. The GM simply filled a great need on his roster at a bargain of a price.

It’s the chairman rolling the dice on how this move will impact the franchise after one of the most tumultuous seasons the organization has ever had.

Now the Bears have to hope the dice don’t come up snake eyes.

Adam Hoge covers the Chicago Bears for WGN Radio and WGNRadio.com. He also co-hosts The Beat, weekends on 720 WGN. Follow him on Twitter at @AdamHoge.