Hub Arkush: Ryan Poles has learned some painful lessons, but he’s ready for more

PALM BEACH, FLA. – Attending his first NFL owners meetings as the general manager of his own team this week, Ryan Poles has apparently heard the rumblings that at least some portion of Bears nation is underwhelmed with his first foray into the trade market and free agency.

“I know there are a lot of questions just in terms of what our plan was going into free agency,” Poles said Monday in a late afternoon oceanside chat.

“The goal was to get as many players into the door as possible that kind of reflected everything that we’ve said from the very beginning, which is high character, passionate about football, tough, smart. And the great thing is as I met the guys that came through the door from Justin Jones to (Byron) Pringle to (Nicholas) Morrow, Lucas Patrick, they have that chip on their shoulder that we’re looking for.”

“I think that is the first step is to make sure that we get the locker room right, the culture right and all of those guys are hungry to make plays.

“When you get toward that second and third wave [of free agency], you always have guys that they felt like they deserved more. They felt like they were out to gain respect for how they played, but also they had an element of [being team-first] to them as well.”

[ Live updates: Bears 2022 free agency news and notes ]

There’s that second and third wave again Poles keeps bringing up, so I asked Poles how he defines them. Are they price points, measured on the calendar, etc.?

“It’s not specifically a day, it’s just when you start to see – it actually starts to get quiet for a second,” Poles said. “You see the fireworks go off in the beginning and then there’s a lull in terms of working the phones. And as that settles down a little bit, you can kind of feel that change, and you can tell that the competition that you have, it changes, the demands change.

“So it’s more of a feel than anything, and drop-off of price point as well.”

We’ve already learned Poles is going to make the tough calls whether it’s trading away his best player for a limited return to come to grips with the reality of the salary cap or telling a young man he’s promised tens of millions of dollars he can’t close the deal, as was the case with Larry Ogunjobi, who failed his physical after tentatively agreeing to a three-year deal with the Bears worth up to $40.5 million

Poles talked Monday about the difficulty of both those moments.

“I would say one of the harder things to do was the Khalil Mack trade,” Poles said. “A guy that caliber of a player is not easy to move on from, but it’s one of those situations that you knew you had to do what is best for the club.”

Poles said head coach Matt Eberflus and team ownership were on board with decision to move Mack.

“They understood that it was the right move at the right time,” Poles said. “I would understand why some people would be upset.”

The failure of Ogunjobi’s deal rocked Poles the hardest.

“I would say the most challenging thing that I had to go through was the Larry Ogunjobi situation,” Poles said. “From the business side, it was very clear, I’m going to listen, we have a process, I’m going to listen to our doctors.

“The toughest thing I’ve had to go through – it was emotionally draining – was to deny someone an opportunity when you have this verbal agreement that that’s what’s going to happen.

“That tore me to pieces. I sat in the back of the car and I had a conversation with the kid and let him know just from what my job was and from my perspective what we had to do. That was hard, really hard.”

And he knows there are more tough calls coming.

“I would love to go do some fun things and, you know, go spend,” Poles said regarding roster construction. “There’s shortcuts that you could use to get more or push stuff down the road, but we’re trying to do it the right way and that takes patience, and it takes a lot of evaluation.”

This much is clear with the rookie general manager, he has a plan he believes in and he’s sticking to it.

But how long it’s going to take to get where he’s going is still a wide-open question.