When Bears president Kevin Warren needed to clarify this week that general manager Ryan Poles isn’t getting fired after the dismissal of former coach Matt Eberflus, that was a clear warning. Once that must be said, it’ll only be said once.
It appears to be 2025-or-bust for Poles, who has formed a strong bond with Warren in their two years together, but wasn’t hired by him.
The rebuilding effort has been incremental by design, but no one gets forever to deliver results. And Eberflus wasn’t the only thing slowing it down.
Poles said in August it was “weird” that the media and public seemed to hold the Bears’ ugly record, now 14-32 and counting since his hiring, against Eberflus while continuing to credit Poles for making progress in personnel pickups. He doesn’t have to worry about that anymore. The wins and losses are attached directly to him now, just as they were to Ryan Pace.
Likewise, Poles’ public approval has dipped to an all-time low, and that’s quite a plunge from the all-time high he enjoyed seven months ago when he drafted quarterback Caleb Williams No. 1 overall and had the Bears eying the playoffs. The goodwill has been spent.
Heat rises, and so do complaints. Every objection to former offensive coordinators Luke Getsy and Shane Waldron also smeared Eberflus, and it’s the same way for Poles with Eberflus. He wears the stain of the mess Eberflus made. It was his hire, and he kept him too long.
The coach he chose and stuck with almost certainly will not get hired at the same level anytime soon. Eberflus might need to take two steps back to position coach for his next job, just as predecessor Matt Nagy did.
On the play that precipitated Eberflus’ final unraveling in Detroit last week, Williams got sacked behind Poles’ offensive line. “Probably the best depth I’ve ever had,” he said before the season. Williams has been sacked an NFL-high 49 times and is on pace to take more sacks than anyone in the past two decades.
Poles inherited a complete mess from Pace in 2022. The Bears had little talent in place for the long run, a salary-cap disaster, compromised draft capital and no quarterback. In his first draft, he didn’t have what would’ve been the No. 5 overall pick because Pace had traded it to move up and take Justin Fields the year before.
That was a lot to fix, but Poles should be further along in the repairs than presiding over a team that’s 4-8 heading into its game Sunday at the 49ers.
By the end of the upcoming offseason, he inarguably will have had every necessary resource and then some to complete the team he envisioned.
The Bears are in Williams’ precious rookie-contract window, and Over The Cap projects them to have the fifth-most cap space at $82 million. They have three draft picks in the first two rounds, currently slotted at Nos. 11, 40 and 42 overall. This roster still needs significant work on both lines of scrimmage, and a former offensive lineman undoubtedly should see that.
He will have had two shots at quarterback and two at head coach. Most general managers get that margin, but rarely more than that.
Poles has a decent list of both hits and misses as he wraps his third season in charge, and the Eberflus ordeal weighs heavily on the wrong side of the scale. The moves he makes in the next five months or so, from the coaching search through the draft, will tip it one way or the other.