What the Chicago Bears did right, wrong in their GM and HC search

What the Chicago Bears did wrong in hiring Ryan Poles and Matt Eberflus

I am one who likes to end on a positive note, so let’s get the negative stuff out of the way first. My biggest gripe with how the Chicago Bears handled their head coach and general manager search is by the timing of the hiring of Ryan Poles. Now, some of you might be thinking, “But Rob, they hired the GM before the head coach,” and you are right. However, it wasn’t enough time before hiring Matt Eberflus in my opinion.

You can sit here and try to tell me that Matt Eberflus was one of the candidates that Ryan Poles gave the Chicago Bears ahead of time during his initial Zoom interview. I will buy that. However, I still believe that it would have been better for Ryan Poles to have sat in on more than three, pre-selected candidates of Bill Polian and George McCaskey.

The fact that Ryan Poles was hired and interviewed Jim Caldwell in the same day screams failure in my opinion. We saw the same thing when Ryan Pace was officially hired and he had to interview Todd Bowles on the same day. I understand that there are time constraints, but if we look at the Chicago Bears new administration, they were the second team to lock in their new general manager and also the second team to announce the hiring of their head coach.

I wanted the Chicago Bears to narrow down their GM search a little sooner. Instead, they cast a wide net and interviewed 10 potential candidates. I’ll admit, Ryan Poles was not on my radar at first, but he was my top candidate outside of Ed Dodds who removed himself from consideration, by the time all the candidates had been first interviewed. The best part in my opinion was that there was not a direct connection between Poles and Bill Polian.

Another issue I had with the Chicago Bears hiring process was not taking a John Harbaugh interview. I feel like Harbaugh should have been interviewed in the process and I don’t care about the, “there was a phone call” between the two sides. They should have all gotten in a room and determined if there was a way to make things work. Would Harbaugh had settled on a six-year, $60 million dollar contract? What about a five-year, $60 million dollar contract?

We will never really know and we are only going to hear one side of things. Not to mention, we don’t even know how long Matt Eberflus is here for, or how much money he is making. If the years and money were such a big deal in regard to Harbaugh, then shouldn’t we have some idea on how long Eberflus and Ryan Poles were hired for? I’ll just assume five years and no more than $8 million per year since the Bears once again hired a first-time head coach. Is that another thing they did wrong? We won’t know for a little bit on that anyway.

I’m going to give Matt Eberflus the benefit of the doubt here, but I will still mention once again how I wanted an offensive-minded coach. Brian Daboll and Byron Leftwich were my top two candidates and I am very curious to see how the Giants do over the next couple of years.

How about the good stuff now?