Ryan Poles Revealed When He Knew He Had Teams By The Throat In Trade Talks

Part of engineering a blockbuster trade is understanding the landscape around you. GM Ryan Poles understood one crucial fact about holding the #1 overall pick. If he wanted to trade it for a robust series of assets for the Chicago Bears, he would need good bait for other teams to bite. Everyone knows there is no stronger bait in any draft than quarterbacks. His efforts to move the pick would count for nothing if the top QBs in the 2023 class didn’t make a strong enough impression.

Poles felt good about his prospects going into February. Bryce Young and C.J. Stroud had both finished their seasons on massive high notes. He knew Anthony Richardson would blow up workouts with his insane athletic profile. The most telling part of the process would come down to interviews. NFL teams almost always determined how aggressive they’d be for players based on personal meetings. According to Adam Jahns and Kevin Fishbain of The Athletic, it was his own interviews with those quarterbacks that he became convinced he’d be able to trade the pick.

“Their interviews were very good,” Poles said. “Mentally, they’re in a really good place to talk ball and talk through the things that they knew about the game, and you could tell like football intelligence was not going to be the issue.

“I knew coming out if those guys interviewed really well, teams at that moment are going to be more motivated to get something done sooner rather than later.”

Ryan Poles again proved his approach works.

There is a benefit to doing due diligence on every single player in the draft, even if it’s at a certain position you’re unlikely to pick from. Gathering information is never a bad thing. It can sometimes lead to learning things that could prove useful, such as which players are almost certain to have made positive impressions in interviews. That means they could make great trade bait in the right circumstances. Poles used that to his fullest advantage, prying two 2nds, a future 1st, and wide receiver D.J. Moore from Carolina.

It’s refreshing to see a Bears GM take such an approach. Previous ones had a terrible habit of shrugging off doing the grunt work when their minds were already made up. Ryan Pace infamously didn’t even bother meeting with Deshaun Watson in 2017. Jerry Angelo admitted he didn’t do enough work in 2005 on DeMarcus Ware, passing on the future Hall of Fame pass rusher for Cedric Benson. Ryan Poles isn’t going to let something like that happen. He will always go the extra mile because he’s convinced there is no such thing as too much information.

This trade proved it.