Ryan Poles wants to close the book on the failures of Chicago Bears regimes past. Last night’s draft, led by Caleb Williams, is going to help him do that.
It’s a new dawn. It’s a new day. It’s a new life, and Ryan Poles is feeling good.
In about 13 months (dating back to the Carolina Panthers trade), the Chicago Bears general manager has ushered in a new future for the franchise. His epic roster remodel crescendoed last night in the first round of the 2024 NFL Draft with his selections of quarterback Caleb Williams at pick No. 1 and wide receiver Rome Odunze as the ninth overall pick.
The team he’ll put them both on is nothing like anything we Bears fans have ever seen: a squad stacked with offensive talent (on paper) and with cornerstone talents already in place on defense.
It’s a team that — no hyperbole here — should truly compete for the playoffs this year and have bigger aspirations in the next few to come.
And yet…Poles can’t escape history.
Sid Luckman. 1985. 2006. 4,000. 30.
If you’re a Bears fan, you know well what those numbers and names signify. But let’s spell it out anyway.
Sid Luckman: The last Bears quarterback to be named First-Team All-Pro. (Luckman did it three times, most recently in 1947, and was also Second-Team All-Pro twice.)
1985: The last time the Bears won a Super Bowl.
2006: The last season this team even played in one.
4,000 and 30: The yard and touchdown benchmarks no Bears quarterback has ever hit, which makes them the only franchise never to have such a passer.
Every time national media (or even local media to a degree) reflects on the Bears’ quarterback position, you hear at least one of the above things. They are reminders of the Bears’ futility at the position — almost like a mental hurdle Poles, Williams and this team have to overcome in addition to everything else.
And Poles wants to kick those hurdles down and clear the lane.
“The history’s the history. Like I’m kind of done talking about it,” he told reporters after the draft’s first round. “You go back so much all the time and those days are over. So we’re bringing players in here that want to really just change everything up and do things a different way. Obviously, we love our history here, but it has hasn’t been smooth recently and it’s time to change. So I just feel like we’ve got to stop going backwards.”
This isn’t the first time Poles has quietly raged against the dredging up of Bears quarterback ignominy. Not a few Bears fans and external media believe Chicago is simply a cursed location for quarterbacks, even those as talented as Caleb Williams. After all, they just traded away an exciting young quarterback in Justin Fields, who fought an uphill battle against the organization and his own weaknesses, to open the job for Williams.
But while Poles has been part of that most recent chapter of quarterback futility, he didn’t create the situation Fields walked into. And he has absolutely no connection to past regimes’ failures for the last 80 or so years to develop a franchise quarterback.
That might be the Bears’ history, but it’s not Ryan Poles’. Nor is it Caleb Williams’.
When your franchise is irrelevant, the past is all people have to refer to. That doesn’t just go for Bears fans looking back on the 80s, either. There’s a reason national media always reaches for the failures of the past when talking about the Bears: there simply isn’t enough success to talk about, regardless of whose fault it is.
But from the moment the Bears turned in the card with Caleb Williams’ name on it, those chapters are in the past. There’s nothing but blanket paper in front of Poles, Williams and Chicago now. This will be new history they’re writing.
And everything about the man they’ve chosen to lead the on-field operation, from the film to the way he bounded out of the tunnel with a primal scream to dap up Roger Goodell last night, suggests this stanza of Bears lore will be like nothing we’ve seen before.
With Poles and Williams leading the way, it’s time for the Bears to give everyone something new to talk about.
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