WrigleyField 22

Among the changes I wouldn't mind seeing on the coaching staff is the entire strength, conditioning and medical. I don't know what the data necessarily supports, but it feels like they haven't done a good job with keeping guys healthy.

Basically there feels like there's no real difference in the NFC South. And the NFC West has lots of parity too with the 49ers having a down year, it feels like Bears got worst draw. At least they get Raiders.

Schoen staying in NY as well. Balke somehow stays in Jacksonville which makes all the Johnson smoke there pretty interesting. Two of the most talked about landing spots for Johnson with possible lame duck GMs (not sure Balkes contract situation). Though Kahn says the coach will report to him.

If Poles is really here to stay I'd put the chances at less than like 5%. He never seemed to like Jenkins and I doubt that's changing.

Incentives and heavy per game bonuses sounds reasonable. I think he hits the market though. So I does depend what other teams give too.

I think I'd really consider bringing Jenkins back even though it won't be cheap and he'll likely miss so much time. There just aren't enough good options hitting FA. You just have to build a deep line, which you should be doing anyways, just a little more emphasis. Go grab another top G in FA. Upgrade Shelton if you can or likely bring him back as a 1 year stop gap. Bring in good swing OT an IOL. Spend one of the top 3 picks on OL and add some flyers in day 3 and FA as well. People have mentioned Jones as filling in one OT spot and he's missed as many snaps as Jenkins the past 2 years. They just have to treat the OL like a group that has to go 8 deep with decent quality. At some point it'd be great if they found themselves a couple studs who also stayed healthy.

Every report and rumor I've seen indicates Poles is safe. Best we can hope for is he's sidelined by new coach Mayo out in NE

Dropped 2 spots. Up to 4 spots if both Raiders and Jets win.

Oh well. Eventually their draft pick luck was going to end.

Doesn't seem very fun. Seriously though it's hilarious how much "sacks are a QB stat" has so many amateur analytics wannabes thinking near record setting sack records are because some adequate line has bad QB. Do you have te source for each of those?

Sadly, the defense is just "they could do worse"

Which minority is Vrabel?

For McCaskeys, it's actually simpler: get the right coach. GM can backfill to the coach. Them trying to assertain a GM-HC relationship is too complex for them. The HC role is much more important so everything should flow from that job first.

I'd fire Poles into the sun, but it's pretty logically inconsistent to decide he's safe as your GM except for Johnson. They should just do the simple thing and fire Poles, but I guess they really believe in him. Maybe it's because Flus was really forced on him and his ass FA spending is really ownership being cheap and a multidide of other reasons that excuse him. Or they just suck.

I'm not super confident in the long term staying power of Kliff but I think he'd be perhaps the best short-term boost. Hopng it's ultimately Johnson. Coen and Slowick are right there with Brady where you feel a little bit like you're just pinning the OC wheel a bit. Kliff is a bit more known commodity.

In a vacuum I'd agree but: He hasn't been just run of the mill bad on the deep ball. Far cry from "you don't have to be great" to perhaps "above and beyond the worst" Also it was unexpected from his baseline. Conversely we knew he'd be a high sack guy. Exactly how far down he can get those numbers will determine his ceiling, but even a year two deadline to get it to a certain % is ultimately pretty arbitrary. But yea 8.5% is that career average Russell Wilson line which generally feels like the limit of sack rate and still being a good QB. But year to year it could be a little higher dependent on non QB factors (and would need to be lower some years too). 11% is high, but I'd hardly blink at 10% as long as it wasn't every year like that. Being a rookie and all I'm optimistic it can be cleaned up with better coaching.

Oh and while Bears OL is probably underrated at this point (they're bad but prob not even bottom 3 in league), Washington and Denver had legitimately strong lines. Washington added about 15M of APY across 2 guys in 24 and a third at $8M in 2023. Plus another investment in retaining Cosmi at 18M APY. They aren't getting anything more than market value for most those guys, but that's good enough. Denver is spending like 70M on their top 4 guys included 2 guys they added in 2023. They're actually getting negative value from that investment but it is actually a good line. Chicago, I'll be generous and say Wright is valued at his expected APY of ~13M instead of actual contract value. Thus they're allocating like 30M to their top 4 paid OL and a third of that is Nate Davis 😔. So despite guys like Pryor, Shelton, Jones, and Jenkins actually providing a lot of surplus value their total line value just sucks because it's under invested in. But hey, they'll have top 5 cap space number for third year running!

It's a disappointing year for him, but yea it's not like throw in the towel bad. The best version of Caleb in college, in his Heisman year, he was a 16% sack to pressure guy. That is basically the absolute highest he probably needs to be at as an NFL guy, which is still a lot higher than other off script merchants like Allen and Mahomes (usually around 10% though Mahomes has career high 17% this year). But it's a very sticky stat so we shouldn't be surprised that it's high. It's an actual area he always was gonna need to improve. If he doesn't improve that you have to really coach the quick hitting/on schedule plays in him until he's a lower TTT guy and is just taking easy first reads and check downs at a higher rate. Another skill he's shown he can do, but favors his play making too much. He's just a triple whammy of (1) long TTT because he's extending plays and thus (2) creating pressures, but (3) letting too many pressures into sacks. Daniels isnt a star in any of these areas, by the way, he just bails out of pockets quick and runs, which he's very good at. TBD if he can hold that up health wise or scheme wise. But that helps cover up what's a pretty meh pressure to sack rate himself (not as bad as Caleb though). And he's had good accuracy on the deep ball unlike Caleb - a departure from NCAA where both excelled in 2023. But they treated him like a 10 year vet from the beginning instead of a rookie with actual bad habits. That's he still has managed 3,600 yards and set a rookie INT streak record speaks to his talent to overcome his weaknesses. But on the INT front probably also speaks to how they coached a lot of the wrong things into him (200 club! 😒). He's all the wrong kinds of aggressive right now beecause they acted like he'd just automatically know every easy read and when to extend/bail when he actually has shown really poor understanding of that. A few more agressive/decisive early throws that led to picks might actually get him learning about when to hit those early reads with tempo. But all his aggression goes to extending plays right now. Which often leads to excessively bad drive killing negative plays. Another areas: Jayden Daniels top 3 PA percentage, 30% Bo Nix: Top 8, 28% Cj Stroud in 23: 12th 25% Caleb Williams: bottom 3. 17% The biggest concern with Caleb right now is the deep game Caleb Williams : 6th highest rate of deep passes. Absolute worst PFF deep pass grade, by a huge margin. Top 10 in worst twp% . 2nd worst Adjusted comp% on deep passes. Bottom 3 comp%. Worst ypa on deep passes. Just absolute junk. Funny enough Mahomes has also been junk here this year. But he's good enough and experienced enough to be overcoming that. On intermediate depth he hasn't been great either, but not as atarkly bad. Hes been good at short passing depth, but a pretty mid rate of attempts while he's 6th highest rate at the godawful deep throws. Not sure how much it's coaching and play calling verse him "playmaking", or even due to playing from behind, but it's been a drag on his production.

Thankfully I don't even think the roster needs wholesale changes. There's plenty of useful players. I don't want another "tear down" excuse (which was BS from start of Poles reign too). Poles seemed actively against his inherited guys for most of his time. If he is magically replaced I hope the next GM is more open to his inherited guys.

I'll save the "get him fired" conspiracy. But if he gets an extension I have to believe for my own sanity that every speculation about him having Flus forced on him his true. And also that he was pressured to build the team according to Flus's desires. Like Flus being a psuedo shadow GM the whole time is the only thing that would give me comfort on Poles moving forward as GM. And of course Poles will have to immediately start acting differently. I'd also be fine if a Ben Johnson sidelined Poles into a glorified player personnel VP. I saw a rumor that Ben Johnsons preferred exec is not Agnew as many have thrown around, but Mike Disner who is currently the COO of Detroit and has some early career experience in scouting but mostly is a business admin/cap guru. I don't know if there is a way Ben can poach him without a GM title to offer, but if it's true I love the mindset. More teams should think about broader GM skills than it just being a scout-savant. More cap nerds as GMs.

McCaskey, obviously. Warren. Hes a total unknown there... But it wouldn't also take a football savant to go hard at Ben Johnson. That's what basically 80% of fans want and I think Warren could handle that (if that's what he'd want). Like even to the extent that the stadium stuff hasn't gone well, I'm not sure that correlates to making a good hire one way or the other. Poles obviously has more football smarts than Warren, but nearly every GM is really football smart and still fail to hire successful coaches with great frequency. Yet relatively competent owners (for this purpose Warren is ownership) who aren't necessarily football smart are capable of making strong coach hires when they're fairly obvious choices. As a recent example, the Yorks hired Shannahan without John Lynch's guidance. So okay assume they're gonna strike out on Johnson anyways and it's a less obvious choice. Even if you'd take Poles over Warren.. It doesn't have to be Poles either. You can start a clean slate and take another swing at a GM-HC combo. Of course that's then also in Warren's hands, but I'm not exactly fearful of what happens if they do worse than Poles at this stage. Or even if Warren just used what football people at his disposal (again every high ranking personnel exec is gonna have plenty of football smarts) and have a go at hiring a head coach. The Lions who we now want to poach from hired a GM-HC pairing that wasn't some obvious pairing, together or even separately (and it was an arranged pairing as I understand it). They used other football people in the building they had and new advisers (more info here .https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/2263788/2020/12/15/chris-spielman-barry-sanders-lions-coach-gm-search?source=user-shared-article and their now COO is credited as identifying Holmes to the team) It's hard, but it can be done with just decent leadership. TBD if Warren is that.

Okay, we'll 99% of ALL GMs over the past 30 years would have taken Caleb so that comment was silly lol. I do understand the draft pick and trade point. Poles has done a decent job in terms of maximizing picks while also not forgoing all aggressiveness. Unfortunately any apparent sound logic has had a lot of bad results. Thats true even though some of those trades netted decent value (from a $ value perspective). Of course he's so afraid of the cap he can't capitalize on net $ value surplus from exchanges like Mack-Brisker or Smith-Dexter. Although the Claypool one hurt both those exchanges. On record he's been as run and D hungry as any GM, often prioritizing run blocking WR in his first years and spending a lot of high picks and the bulk of FA spending on D. And on results weve gotten awful O results, probably worse than Pace and Angelo and definitely Emery. Granted I never agreed with the tank approach so I suspect I'm biased in a sense, but Caleb alone doesn't erase the rest of Poles' record. Any other positives are offset by enough negatives.

I mean yea the tank thing I'll give you, but if that's Poles only defining characteristic I'll thank him and can't wait for him to be out the door since it has nothing to do with football acumen. I've seen enough smart coaches GMs improve teams fortunes without that kind of luck, if that's all he's offering. The rest is such a charactutization of those GMs. Like yea they sucked, and did different goofy things... As has Poles. He's really a contiuation the Bears recent past, not a departure from it.

McClellin flopped, but Long, Fuller, and Jeffrey were all pretty good Rd 1 and 2 picks. He was bad, but so is Poles and charicaturing the other GMs to make Poles not seem as bad is silly.

Bills in 2017 are the only one I can immediately think of. Maybe there's others, but I truly don't know if that was "planned" or actually just a power struggle come early. As a planned approach it's silly though. They can get a guy in to be the football mind if Poles isn't it. They can do it all in the one cycle as a GM-HC combo. Or if Johnson or an experienced HC is the guy they can do it later on and they can get into FA and draft with the next top 2/3 personnel guys intact. I can't think of a coach of recent memory that has weilded that much power to get a guy fired to get a job. That included very highly regarded hires. Maybe it's kept guys from taking jobs because they couldn't.. But I guess that what they have to be prepared for if they keep Poles (and maybe are extending him).