Before Bears general manager Ryan Poles walked into the Halas Hall press conference room Tuesday morning, the table and two chairs on the dais were replaced by a podium and a microphone.
Poles would be the main event. And he’d be speaking alone.
He did for 26 minutes Tuesday. President/CEO Kevin Warren assumed the role of his predecessor Ted Phillips, taking questions in the corner of an adjacent room when Poles was finished. Warren spoke for just 11 minutes — about three minutes longer than the opening statement he gave the last time the two stumbled in trying to present their shared vision for the Bears.
The optics were intentional. The Bears’ audience was more than just the fan base — it was their growing list of potential head coaches around the league. The Bears wanted to portray clarity about who was in charge to the coaches, and agents, who’d spent the last month wondering. They needed to clean up a mess of their own making.
When Poles and Warren spoke last month about firing then-coach Matt Eberflus, Warren commanded the press conference while Poles was cowed. Warren wore a suit and sat up straight. Poles wore a quarter-zip and slouched. Warren empowered Poles then, calling him the point person in the coaching search, but stumbled over what would happen if the two disagreed on their choice. By the time Warren was done speaking, some around the league began wondering if Warren, and not Poles, had the authority in the search.
Others speculated that Poles thought Warren was too overreaching in their day-to-day dealings. Tuesday, Poles called that nonsense.
“We spend almost every single day together talking about solutions and direction of where we want to be and where we’re going to go,” he said. “I mean, it is so far from the truth.”
Poles and Warren met at Halas Hall at 6 a.m. Tuesday. They’ll continue to see a lot of each other as the Bears spend weeks finding a new head coach.
“I trust him,” Warren said. “He’s a hard worker, he’s young, he’s talented, he’s curious. … He wants to win, he loves this franchise, he’s passionate about the Chicago Bears and he’s going to do everything that he can.”
Including making the coach pick.
“I’ll end up selecting the coach — I’m taking the lead on that,” Poles said. “[Chairman] George [McCaskey] and Kevin have put me in charge of that. And that will be the relationship between the coach and I.”
The Bears’ front-office structure is vertical — the head coach reports to the GM, who reports to the president, who reports to the chairman. That’s not likely to change, McCaskey even if a head coach candidate tells him he’d rather report to ownership.
“I haven’t ever experienced anyone saying that,” McCaskey said. “Usually, they want the job.”
And what if a candidate wants to bring in his own GM? Warren shut that down.
“[Poles] is our point person on the search,” Warren said. “He’s our general manager. He’s head of football operations.”
Candidates will have questions, though, about their own alignment with the GM. Poles is finishing the third year of his contract. A coach would just be starting his tenure. Despite the Bears’ tremendous struggles during Poles’ three years, it wouldn’t be unusual for the team to give the GM a contract extension to put the two on the same timeline. They did when former GM Ryan Pace hired coach Matt Nagy.
Poles wouldn’t comment on his contract other than to say that he’d address it with the candidates.
“In the interviews that I have participated in, that has never been a factor,” McCaskey said. “No one has ever come in and said ‘I’m not going to come here unless the general manager and I are on the same timeline.’ So I don’t think that’s going to be a factor. “
It will be, though. The question is whether it’s a deal-breaker.
