INDIANAPOLIS — Bears general manager Ryan Poles said Tuesday that amid offers to deal the No. 1 overall pick, there’s one player that hasn’t been asked about in trades: quarterback Justin Fields. Poles claimed that not a single team has asked if Fields is available.
“I haven’t gotten that yet,” he said.
Poles said the Bears’ preference to trade the pick, and not Fields, has remained unchanged.
“We’ve always leaned that way [toward trading the pick] because Justin did some really good things,” he said Tuesday morning at the start of the NFL Scouting Combine. “I’m excited about where his game is going to go. But at the same time when you sit in our situation at No. 1 overall, you have to do your due diligence, you have to investigate everything, you have to spend time with those guys just to make sure we’re making the right decision.
“What’s important to me — and I think everyone knows me by now and how I want to treat our players — we’ll be in communication with Justin along the way just to make sure that he knows what we’re doing and nothing is a surprise to him.”
Poles said last month that he’d have to be “blown away” to draft a quarterback to replace Fields. He held that line Tuesday, saying that Fields starting for the Bears is “the plan right now.”
“We’re going to do our homework on this [quarterbacks draft] class,” he said. “And, if something changes ... I’ll use the same statement — ‘We gotta be blown away’ — to say, ‘Do you know what? I think this is best for our organization.’”
He declined to offer a timeline for trading the draft pick, though he said the Bears could be incentivized to make a move before the start of free agency in mid-March if they were getting a player back as part of the return for the pick.
