Ryan Poles isn’t a great place right now. The GM has taken it on the chin for weeks as the Chicago Bears’ season fell apart, going from 4-2 to 4-11. It is one of the greatest in-season collapses in NFL history. Their nine-game losing streak is the second-longest in franchise history, trailing only the 14-game skid between 2022 and 2023. Poles has been the GM during both. It is becoming impossible to justify him keeping his job beyond this season despite recent assurances from team president Kevin Warren. One person who might be on board with moving on is Cole Kmet.
The tight end has been around for Poles’ entire rebuild since 2022. He has supported the effort vocally at every opportunity. However, it appears Kmet isn’t about that any longer. His frustration is reaching a point where he is openly taking digs at the Bears GM for his inability to turn the team around. No names were mentioned, but there wasn’t much subtlety in his remarks. Jason Lieser of the Chicago Sun-Times was the one who spoke to the tight end about the situation.
“I’m done with the positivity talk when the results aren’t there,” Kmet told the Sun-Times. “I’ve already heard that story, and it doesn’t work. You’ve got to be real about the issues and confront them — and there’s a lot of them, for sure.
“You see tons of teams in the league turn it around after one year. All it takes is a little bit here and there to turn things over. You look across the league and see teams that weren’t good last year and now are in the playoff hunt, and for us it hasn’t happened.”
He is clearly insinuating that Poles didn’t keep his promise. The GM asked veterans like him and Jaylon Johnson to trust the process. He would get things turned around. Poles overhauled the entire roster, eating up three precious years of their primes. In return, they got more losing and more dysfunction. It would be a surprise if a player didn’t become bitter about that. Kmet hasn’t experienced a winning season in his career. Even Dick Butkus, who never made the playoffs, at least got to witness one year like that.
Why should Cole Kmet trust anything this regime says at this point? There is no reason to. He was a good soldier for three years and even signed a team-friendly contract extension. He’s been rewarded with nothing in return. In many ways, Kmet has become this era’s Doug Buffone: an utterly dependable player who arrived just as the franchise was plummeting to irrelevance. Buffone became bitter from those experiences in the 1960s and 1970s. Kmet doesn’t wish to go down that road.
