Bears cruising toward 2 high draft picks, but what will GM Ryan Poles do with them?
The Bears currently are projected to pick twice in the top 10 next year and have a good chance at landing the No. 1 overall selection.
Things are looking good for the Bears after beating the Panthers on Thursday.
Well, not good in the present. They’re still 3-7. But good as far as the 2024 draft is concerned.
They’re in a unique position to have two very high picks thanks to their trade with the Panthers, who are 1-8 and slotted for No. 1. The Bears’ own pick is on track for No. 5. Between the two, ESPN’s Football Power Index calculated the Bears having a 43% chance of getting the first pick.
It’s rare to have two top-10 picks, let alone two in the top five.
But as alluring as that is, it’s only valuable if general manager Ryan Poles has a good plan. Teams are looking for players whose numbers they’ll retire when they’re picking that high, and it often doesn’t turn out like that. The Bears picked in the top 10 every year from 2015 through ’18, and the only player who materialized into something special was Roquan Smith — now with the Ravens.
The Colts were the last team to pick first and second, by the way, and in 1992 took defensive end Steve Emtman and linebacker Quentin Coryatt. Neither made even a single Pro Bowl and both were gone by the end of 1997. When they got it right with Peyton Manning at No. 1 in 1999 and Edgerrin James at No. 4 the next year, they skyrocketed.
In Poles’ rebuild, which is going painstakingly slowly, he’s still missing the biggest piece: a quarterback. And a general manager can’t be picking this high in the draft two years in a row and not come away with one by the end of it.
That quarterback could be Justin Fields, of course, and that would make Poles’ job much easier.
He could spend those picks to address other major areas of need like pass rusher, defensive tackle, wide receiver and offensive line. He could even flip one of those picks into multiple assets in 2025 and ’26, similar to when he traded with the Panthers to move down from No. 1 to 9 this year in a deal that landed him their 2024 first-rounder, ’25 second-rounder and wide receiver DJ Moore.
But regardless of the various factors that have worked against Fields since Ryan Pace drafted him 11th overall in 2021, he has not made a definitive case that he’s the franchise quarterback. He now has seven games — at most — to make a statement strong enough to bury his performance over two and a half seasons.
Unless Fields shows something profound over the rest of the season, the idea of keeping him another season — he’s under contract for next season with a team option for 2025 — while putting other pillars in place isn’t going to work. The Bears saw where the everything-but-the-quarterback approach got them with Mitch Trubisky in 2018 and ‘19.
