Well, you can't say Ryan Poles doesn't care about the offensive line now.
Ironically enough, for the first few years of Poles' time as the Bears' GM, his approach to the team's offensive line was, at best, questionable. Taking Darnell Wright with a top-10 pick was the real exception, and fans watched for months on end as assorted Bears quarterbacks scrambled for their lives in a 17-point loss.
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But things are different now! Thanks to Drew Dalman, Joe Thuney, and Jonah Jackson, the Bears are probably going to win the Super Bowl. Poles' commitment to finally fixing the line – or at least some of it – is commendable, and in Albert Breer's latest mailbag full of defintely-real-questions-from-definitely-real-people, Breer takes some time to heap praise on Poles for the smart extension he got done with Thuney.
The Bears' Joe Thuney extension looks pretty, pretty good already
"... the Joe Thuney extension is done! And good for him. The new Bears guard, now 32, has one of the most amazing statistical lines that no one ever talks about—over nine years, he’s never played fewer than 97% of his team’s offensive snaps in a season. Starting in 2016, he’s gone 100%, 100%, 100%, 99%, 97%, 99%, 98%, 97%, and 97% of the snaps, while missing just two games. That’s beyond staggering. Anyway, I figured we could get a quick appreciation for that in here. His deal with the Bears is a good one. He had $16 million left. The two-year extension is for $35 million in new money, bringing his three-year total to $51 million, with $33.5 million fully guaranteed. That $33.5 million is the first two years of the deal, with the team holding a de facto option for 2027 on him at $17.5 million."
That's a lot of sentences about a lot of numbers that my mind can't quite wrap itself around, but I assume the crux of it is that the Bears are going to win the Super Bowl. Anytime Poles gets credit for actually doing *something* on the offensive line, it's worth blogging about – these moments don't come around as much as Bears fans would like them to. But that's a thing of the past now that the Bears are a smart, modern franchise that goes to great lengths to [checks notes] extend a 32-year old offensive lineman.