How much blame should Chicago Bears GM Ryan Poles take for disastrous 2024 season?

Ryan Poles didn’t look happy.

The Chicago Bears general manager sat listening to team president Kevin Warren for eight minutes before it was his turn to speak.

Just days earlier, Poles and Warren made the decision to fire Bears head coach Matt Eberflus. That decision, no doubt, took a toll on Poles. This was the head coach he hired in January 2022 and backed wholeheartedly for more than two years.

It should come as little surprise that Poles was not happy. When it finally was his turn to speak, Poles thanked Eberflus one last time.

“When you build relationships with someone over a period of time, to let them go is tough,” Poles said. “But I want to thank coach Eberflus for his efforts and his dedication while he was here. But at the end of the day, we just came up short too many times and we had to make a change.”

Most fans would agree that firing Eberflus was the right choice. Eberflus' teams were 5-19 in one-possession games. In the end, Eberflus' clock management issues at the end of games cost him his job.

Poles and Warren will work “in tandem” to find the right head coach for the organization. That process has only just begun.

That sounded good and well, in theory, last week. Then the Bears returned to the football field for the first time on Sunday with interim head coach Thomas Brown in charge.

The San Francisco 49ers ran them out of the building on Sunday. Although the teams entered the game separated by only one game in the NFC standings, it was painfully apparent which team had the deeper roster.

If the Bears are ever going to compete in the NFC North, let alone the NFC as a whole, this roster is going to need a lot more work.

Bears fans came into the season hopeful that year No. 3 of Poles' rebuild would start to show results. Two years ago, Poles tore the Bears roster apart. He traded Khalil Mack and Roquan Smith, and he let veterans like Allen Robinson and Akiem Hicks walk away in free agency.

Poles sacrificed the present for the future, and the 2022 Bears won only three games.

But two years later, the current 4-9 Bears might not be any better than the 6-11 football team Poles inherited. Over the last two years, the blame has been passed around. It was Luke Getsy’s fault, then it was Justin Fields' fault, then Shane Waldron, and finally Eberflus.

The scrutiny from here on out is going to fall squarely on Poles. To be clear, Poles isn’t going anywhere. Warren fully backs his GM.

“I want to make sure we’re clear about [this]: Ryan Poles is the general manager of the Chicago Bears and he will remain the general manager of the Chicago Bears,” Warren said during last week’s news conference. “Ryan is young. He’s talented. He’s bright. He’s hard-working. He has done everything in his power on a daily basis to bring a winner to Chicago. And I’m confident in Ryan.”

That might all be true, but the GM has much more to prove.

On the day the Bears introduced Poles, he said he wanted to build his team in the trenches first. Somewhere over the last year, the GM strayed from that notion.

The Bears made a modest improvement at the center position over the offseason, bringing in veteran Coleman Shelton. Otherwise, Poles left the offensive line unchanged since last season and pinned his hopes on Braxton Jones improving at left tackle and Nate Davis being reliable at right guard.

There’s no better example that this plan has backfired than Sunday’s game against San Francisco, when the 49ers sacked Caleb Williams seven times and those sacks were coming from both the edges and the interior.

This wide receiver group, led by veterans DJ Moore and Keenan Allen, was supposed to help Williams hit the ground running. Instead, the Bears rank 30th among 32 teams in passing yards per game.

Williams, the No. 1 overall draft pick, has persevered above the dysfunction, showing some promising traits. That is a bright spot for Bears fans.

But it also makes clear what Poles' objective has to be over the offseason, regardless of who the Bears hire as head coach: surround the QB with talent. And that can’t just mean wide receivers and playmakers.

The Bears need to get back to the hard-nosed, interior-focused team that Poles envisioned in January 2022. This is not that team.

The pressure is on Poles to make it happen.