The Kansas City Chiefs front office staff has garnered plenty of respect around the league over the past few seasons. Their work has catapulted the franchise to four consecutive appearances in the AFC championship game and a Super Bowl title.
One of the Chiefs’ top executives during that time was Ryan Poles, who has recently been hired as the new general manager for the Chicago Bears. Poles had worked in the Kansas City front office for over a decade working his way up to Director of College Scouting under John Dorsey and most recently filled the Executive Director of Player Personnel role under general manager Brett Veach.
On Wednesday, Poles was a guest on NFL Network’s Good Morning Football, speaking with Peter Schrager about his new job and role in the infamous 2017 draft trade to move up and select Patrick Mahomes.
“I was part of the process,” said Poles. “You know, that’s part of scouting anytime you have a good group, like no one’s gonna take even credit for one draft pick. It was part of the process. I give you know, Brett (Veach) and John (Dorsey) and all those guys a lot of credit. You know, they saw it too, so I’m not gonna take credit for that.”
The Chiefs traded the No. 27 overall pick, a third-round pick, and their 2018 first-round selection to the Buffalo Bills to move to No. 10 to select Mahomes. It’s a decision that often frustrates Bears fans because the franchise chose to use their No. 2 overall pick to choose Mitchell Trubinsky, who, as of last season, was the backup for Josh Allen in Buffalo.
Hey @ChicagoBears fans, want goosebumps? Here’s new GM Ryan Poles…
"It's surreal… They've created this hallway when you enter and as you walk down the white lights start to go off & it's Payton, Sayers, Butkus, and it gives you intent everyday to live up to that standard." pic.twitter.com/OVIkfDXVqN
— Good Morning Football (@gmfb) March 2, 2022
Poles also took time to speak with chicagobears.com to further elaborate on his experiences during the NFL combine and draft while in the Chiefs organization. He spoke about scenarios where the team had removed players from its draft board, explaining some of the red flags that they look for in the interview process.
“The one thing we look for, and it may not take them off the board, but just not taking ownership of things in the past,” Poles said. “Like when we watch a play or talk about a mistake they made in life. we’re looking for someone to say, ‘I messed up. That’s on me. This is what I learned from it and this is how I’m going to move on.’ That’s what we’re looking for and some of them just refuse to do that, and it’s hard to see progress in a person when you’re just not taking ownership of things.”
One of Poles’ responsibilities in Kansas City involved the use of analytics. He would help the Chiefs’ analytics team create a composite score based on combine results to help determine whether the team would raise or lower prospects on the draft board.
“There’s an eye test for the positional drills and how they move and their hips,” Poles said. “It’s all about, ‘Does it match the tape?’ The other thing is I work with our analytics group; I always have, in Kansas City and I’ll do that now. We create scores of a combination of all the drills and all the timed and measured events, we’re looking for guys to fall into a certain range by position. The only time where things will change or we need to do more work is when they fall out of that. If it’s poor, that would make us concerned. Or if it’s elite and it’s an outlier, then we have to make sure, ‘Are we missing something, should we move the guy up the board just a little bit because he’s got special traits?'”
The Chiefs have been perennial Super Bowl contenders with Poles in the front office. The 36-year-old has been credited with an ability to identify quality players in the draft and free agency, which is one of the reasons he ended up as the general manager in Chicago. It’s some of the little things that he’s encountered during his long road to becoming a general manager that will surely make him successful in his new role.
