Ryan Poles has been maneuvering ever since the Bears hired him as their general manager, and this season will reveal how many of his moves have been the right ones.
Last season barely showed anything about anyone in the organization. It always was going to be a burn year for a team that bottomed out in 2021 and was in bad shape financially. Poles’ teardown in Year 1, which produced a team that finished with an NFL-worst record of 3-14, was the easy part. Building is harder.
Poles deserves a third offseason before any concrete judgments are made, and once again he’ll be loaded with salary-cap space and draft capital next year. But two offseasons are enough to gauge whether he at least has the Bears reasonably on track.
The majority of their key players this season were chosen by Poles in the draft, free agency or trade market, and he has directly or indirectly signed off on the others who were left to him by predecessor Ryan Pace.
In the case of quarterback Justin Fields, for example, Poles officially took over responsibility for however that turns out when he opted against using the No. 1 pick to reload with someone new. He also extended tight end Cole Kmet on a $50 million deal, bypassed cap savings in favor of retaining safety Eddie Jackson and offensive lineman Cody Whitehair and has made various other comments and decisions reinforcing certain players’ standing within the organization.
So with a roster that mostly fits his vision and a team determined to compete — rather than merely accept its limitations and last-place fate like last season — the grades are about to come in for Poles.
The evaluation will swing largely on Fields, which is the biggest risk Poles has taken.
He saw a quarterback who had been through two seasons of the organization essentially working against him and bet that he’d thrive with the proper personnel. He saw a quarterback who rushed for 1,000 yards last season but was the most ineffective passer in the league and believed he could make the leap into something closer to Jalen Hurts.
He’s going to look brilliant if he’s right. But if that doesn’t happen, it’s going to be yet another brutal reset at quarterback for the Bears. That’ll be even more of a stain if No. 1 pick Bryce Young flourishes with the Panthers.
That’s a lot of pressure on Poles, but he knew what he was walking into when he joined the Bears. The last four decades were not his fault, but he does carry the weight of them. That’s the context for anyone who takes that job.
When it was mentioned to Poles that the Bears have been asking people for patience for far too long and he doesn’t get forever to redirect the team, he replied, “There’s no doubt about that.”
He is determined to build something the Bears haven’t had in many of their fans’ lifetimes: a consistent winner. There have been spikes of success, but it never has been sustained. They haven’t had back-to-back winning seasons since 2005 and ’06, they’re one of just six teams that has gone a decade or more without winning a playoff game and their record is in the bottom third of the NFL since the league expanded to 32 teams in 2002.
It’s a massive request to ask for patience from anyone who has been sitting through that. The fan base seems willing to give it to Poles, whose direct, transparent style has been refreshing after Pace tried to run Halas Hall like the CIA.
“Doing free agency the right way, staying in the parameters of where you’re at financially, can pay off big time,” Poles said coming out of last season. “We’ve seen across the league, historically, that when you go too hard in free agency and the next year you’re making cuts and doing different things with contracts — that’s usually not a good thing for sustaining success for a long period of time.
“We’re trying to do this thing where we can win for a long period of time and step it up the right way. I don’t want to climb up hard and fall back down. No one has patience for that, either.”
That’s what happened with the Rams, who went all-in to win the Super Bowl in 2021, then crashed to 5-12 last season and lack the draft capital and cap space to turn it around anytime soon. Bears fans would take that deal in a heartbeat, by the way, but Poles makes a sensible point.
He came from the Chiefs, who found their quarterback in Patrick Mahomes and have deftly shuffled the pieces around him to reach five consecutive AFC title games. They’ve had a chance to win the championship each of those seasons and did so twice. They’re the betting favorite again this season.
The Chiefs deserve credit for how they’ve drafted and managed their payroll, but those shrewd moves wouldn’t have nearly the same effect if they had drafted Mitch Trubisky instead of Mahomes. It takes more than a quarterback to win it all, but that’s the -biggest component of any contender.
“We all know [quarterback] is where it starts, so you want to surround him with talent,” Poles said as he weighed his roster after free agency and the draft. “We had to wait a little bit to do it the way I wanted to do it and . . . we found some good opportunities to do that.”
Poles signed right guard Nate Davis and drafted right tackle Darnell Wright 10th overall to reshape the persistently problematic offensive line. He traded for wide receiver Chase Claypool last year and DJ Moore in March, paying a big price for each. The second-round pick he sent the Steelers for Claypool turned out to be No. 32 overall, and Moore arrived as part of the deal with the Panthers to move down from No. 1.
That doesn’t do much good if the Bears, who gave up the most points in the NFL last season, lose every game 40-30.
Poles has spent three second-round picks — Kyler Gordon, Jaquan Brisker and Tyrique Stevenson — on upgrading the secondary. He dropped $92 million on free-agent linebackers Tremaine Edmunds and T.J. Edwards. He drafted two defensive tackles — Gervon Dexter and Zacch Pickens — in the top 64 picks and splurged for a $10.5 million pass rusher in Yannick Ngakoue.
Again, it’s not a perfect roster, but it’s viable. It gives coach Matt Eberflus — another pivotal selection by Poles — a chance to show what he can do, as well. As a defensive-minded coach, he and coordinator Alan Williams should be able to develop the young players quickly and maximize what the Bears have on that side of the ball.
Those moves will factor significantly into evaluating Poles, but as usual, it all comes back to Fields.
If Poles is proved right about him, the Bears should be decent this season. They’ve finally given him a proper offensive line after he got sacked 91 times in 27 games over his first two seasons. The surrounding skill players are all average or better, and Moore is by far the most talented receiver Fields has had. The defense is a question mark, but overall there’s enough in place for a best-case -scenario of making the playoffs.
And then Poles has two first-round picks and a lot more cap space to vault the Bears into legitimate contention next season.
That’s if everything goes right, especially with Fields.
If Fields remains essentially the same quarterback he was last season, the Bears likely will be one of the NFL’s worst teams. They almost can’t help but be better than last season, but it could be a negligible improvement.
Fields is electric. That’s indisputable, and it creates an incredibly high potential. At any time, he could make a game-changing play. But most of those heroics have come as a runner, and the Bears still are looking for him to consistently make the basic passes that keep an offense humming.
“He needs to take the next step,” Eberflus said. “Just like the rest of us do.”
Fields led all quarterbacks in rushing last season but was last in yards passing at 149.5 per game. The last NFL quarterback to throw at least 300 passes and have an average that low was Blaine Gabbert as a rookie in 2011.
Poles viewed that within the context of the roster demolition depleting the support around Fields and the new coaching staff having to reteach him after a lost rookie season under Matt Nagy. He saw the potential and projected Fields to reach it once those problems are solved, and he liked the player he envisioned more than any of the quarterbacks he could’ve taken with the No. 1 pick.
Poles said he needed to see a ceiling “so far above Justin” from Young, C.J. Stroud, Anthony Richardson or someone else to keep the top pick and take one of them. In his evaluation, they didn’t overtake the quarterback he already had.
If Fields can’t grow into the player Poles imagines this season, quarterback becomes the Bears’ priority in the draft, and there’s no telling how that would shift the timeline of the rebuild. Acquiring players in their late 20s might not make sense if it’s still going to be awhile at quarterback. And the coaching staff might need some changes.
That all translates to asking Bears fans for more patience, which is something Poles can only do for so long. But if he’s right — and that’ll soon be clear one way or the other — he won’t have to.
