FMIA Combine Week: Ryan Poles on “Healing” the Bears and His Plan for the First Overall Pick

INDIANAPOLIS—Saturday morning, Scouting Combine week, Chicago GM Ryan Poles’ hotel room, 19 stories above downtown Indy, scouts’ clicker in his hands, watching the 2022 Lions on tape. This is college scouting season, but Poles works these days with an eye on looming free-agency, and on the competition too.

It’s early in his GM career for Poles, 37, to have the first pick of the 2023 NFL Draft, but sometimes fate chooses you. And Da Bears could use this piece of great fortune, the first pick in a draft when there’s voraciousness to get to number one. The last time the Bears won the Super Bowl, the only time they won the Super Bowl, Poles was four months old. The last time the Bears won a playoff game, in the 2010 season, Poles was a second-year scout in Kansas City, just trying to make his way in the business.

Now he owns the joint, and he’s well aware what’s at stake.

“I believe in building something to sustain success for a long period of time,” Poles said. “To me that’s gotta be through the draft. This is just a chance to load up this team up with a bunch of opportunity and flexibility to do that. It’s time for this organization. The [practice] facility and offices were just built. The new president [Kevin Warren] comes in, and we think in the same innovative way, I think. We’re in position to have a new stadium. Now, with this opportunity with the first pick, it feels like an opportunity to kind of heal some of the things that happened before and become a really good team. Everything feels right.”

Poles spoke softly but urgently in 50 minutes. He was supportive of quarterback Justin Fields, saying “we’ve got to see it through” in giving Fields a chance to be the team’s long-term starter. It’s clear he’s not trading