Windy City Gridiron
The incoherent ramblings of a belligerent Bears fan.
Man, it was nice while it lasted, wasn’t it?
I know some Chicago Bears fans actually wanted a loss in week 18 for draft position but that wasn’t me. I’m all for tanking if a team needs a QB, especially if there’s an excellent prospect coming up in the draft, but I wanted the win against the Packers. I wasn’t expecting it, but I was damn glad it happened.
Monday I was hopeful we would hear the Bears were making an additional change, but no news came down. It wasn’t surprising. It was probably expected.
I hadn’t planned on writing about Tuesday’s end of year pressers this week. I was probably going to write up why it was the wrong decision to keep Ryan Poles, but I didn’t think there would be a need for a Hot Take Tuesday column until I heard the nonsense coming out of Halas Hall.
Where to start? I suppose we should start with Ryan Poles, who instilled zero confidence in me when I heard him talk to the press today.
Poles is very comfortable in front of the media when it’s all yucks and “Hey, we have Caleb and Rome rah rah!” But when he’s in even the slightest uncomfortable press conference, he loses eye contact, becomes unsure of himself, and does not look like a confident leader. Poles wasn’t as bad as he was at Thanksgiving, but he wasn’t much better.
Poles’ answer about the offensive line was laughably bad.
I think my favorite part of the day was the Chicago Tribune’s Dan Wiederer asking Poles a question about Caleb Williams and mentions the “disruption and stress” that Williams faced Poles interrupted him and asked, “What disruption and stress?”
Is Poles that clueless or is he just pretending to be? I certainly hope it’s the latter but it’s hard to determine at this point.
Let’s move onto Kevin Warren. Ryan Poles reports to Warren, so it would be important to get his stance on Ryan Poles’ contract status being he only has one year left on his contract. We also know how important it is for coaches to know they are walking into a stable situation and that the GM will be there. Kevin Warren preached stability last year, so clearly, he wants to extend Ryan Poles, right? What does he think about keeping Ryan Poles here long-term? “When we say long-term, a year is a lifetime,” Warren said.
Excuse me?
Now look, I don’t think Ryan Poles should have been retained, but now that we are here, you can’t lame-duck him with a new head coach. You want to let the new head coach know that there’s no stability and set off red flags all over an interview process? Tell the candidate that Poles may not be here in 2025 and see how it goes. If the Bears are playing coy and planning on extending him, just do it. What they did today serves...
