Windy City Gridiron
The 2026 season will mark Ryan Poles’ fifth season as general manager of the Chicago Bears. Things are trending in the right direction for his regime, seeing as though the Bears won the NFC North last year and won their first playoff game since the 2010-11 season.
It took a little while for things to get rolling, but Poles has the Bears trending in the right direction heading into 2026. It hasn’t been all sunshine and rainbows, as I highlighted when ranking his five worst moves as the team’s general manager. However, in order to get his team into the playoffs and winning double-digit games, you clearly have to have done some things right.
After shining light on the bad, let’s do the same with the good. These are Ryan Poles’ five best moves as the general manager of the Bears.
I’ve put three of the Bears’ 2025 draft picks into the honorable mentions list because the players are all so early in their NFL careers. However, their draft haul looks to have strengthened an already strong offensive foundation on their roster, and that’s not even including the encouraging flashes Ozzy Trapilo showed at left tackle before he got hurt.
Luther Burden III is an elite YAC threat who was incredibly efficient last year, to the tune of his ranking No. 11 in the NFL in PFN WR Impact Scoring. Colston Loveland ranked No. 6 in their corresponding metric for tight ends, working the seam and stretching the field much better than the average tight end, especially among rookies. Kyle Monangai also proved to be a tough, tenacious runner who served as a stellar complement to D’Andre Swift. All three selections have aged incredibly well thus far and could certainly move up these rankings in due time.
This isn’t one specific move as much as it is an overarching theme in Poles’ tenure as the Bears’ general manager. When he took over in the role, his predecessor Ryan Pace left the Bears in the bottom 10 in cap space. With an aging roster that clearly wasn’t going to compete, Poles inherited several bad contracts, releasing several overpaid veterans and trading others who still had trade value. In his first year as general manager, Chicago led the NFL with over $93 million in dead cap.
Some of that dead cap carried over to 2023, but in each of the last three offseasons, the Bears have had a tremendous lack of dead cap space compared to what Poles inherited early on. They ranked 26th in dead cap in 2024, 32nd in 2025, and 22nd in 2026. The DJ Moore trade is eating most of that dead cap this year, and there will be no dead cap on him or any other 53-man rosterable player in 2027, as of...
