The Bears are expected to take USC quarterback Caleb Williams (13, celebrating a touchdown against Oregon with tight end Carson Tabaracci) with the No. 1 overall pick in the 2024 NFL Draft on Thursday night in Detroit.
Andy Nelson, AP Photos
With the No. 1 overall pick in a draft with a quarterback as the consensus No. 1 prospect, this draft isn’t so much about Ryan Poles’ evaluation skills but his intuition.
Anybody who evaluates Williams’ tape can see his extraordinary skills. But there’s much more to it than that. And that’s why the Bears’ general manager gets paid the big bucks.
It’s Poles’ job to know what it is that makes Caleb Williams’ tick. Does he have the “it” factor that makes everyone around him better and tilts the field in his favor in crunch time? Does he instill confidence in his teammates and put fear into a defense in game-deciding moments? A good quarterback can make a good team better, but a great quarterback can put a good team on his shoulders and take it over the top.
You can already tell that Poles feels he has found something special in Williams. At his season-ending press conference in January, he promised “to turn over every stone to make sure that we are going to make a sound decision for our organization” to decide whether to keep Justin Fields or draft quarterback with the No. 1 overall pick. He turned over the first stone and was all but done.
Caleb Williams changed everything for Poles. After trading the No. 1 overall pick prior to free agency last season, he was expecting a much longer process this time with the potential for an historic haul for the No. 1 pick.
“In my mind right now, I’m gonna take this all the way to April,” he said on Jan. 10.
By March 16, after the NFL Combine but before Williams’ pro day at USC, Fields was traded to the Steelers for a conditional sixth-round draft pick. Poles had seen — and heard — enough to know he had found his quarterback.
It remains to be seen if Poles’ intuition is right. Williams has to be more than an upgrade over Fields. He has to do more than just step over the low bar of Bears quarterback performance over the last 30-plus seasons. He has to be “the guy.” He has to win playoff games. He has to be a difference-maker. He has to give the Bears something they haven’t had since Jim McMahon was healthy, and Sid Luckman before that.
But Poles has earned the faith of Bears fans. He put himself in this fortuitous position when he traded the No. 1 overall pick in the 2023 draft to the Panthers for a package that included wide receiver DJ Moore and the Panthers 2024 No. 1 pick that turned into gold.
And Poles was the Chiefs’ director of college scouting when they saw something special in Patrick Mahomes, who was 13-16 as a starter at Texas Tech, but has been the epitome of the it-factor quarterback who wills his team to victory in the biggest moments. Not everybody saw that coming.
Mahomes’ success has been so spectacular — three Super Bowl victories in the last five seasons — any comparison to him is unfair. But there’s no doubt that Poles feels he has a quarterback with that makeup. He sees the best in everything he does, from his lowest moment to his over-the-top bravado.
Asked about Williams indicating on social media a goal of winning eight Super Bowls to break Tom Brady’s record, Poles embraced it as a sign of driven competitor rather than suggest Williams should slow his roll.
“I love it,” Poles said. “You’re more intentional when you have these goals — you have to live a certain way. You have to practice a certain way. You have to go about your business a certain way in order to accomplish those. If everything else is in line underneath that, that gets me excited.”
As we know by now, the unflappable, measured Poles is not the excitable type. But like every other talent evaluator, he thinks he knows special when he sees it. This is the moment where we find out if he’s right.