LacertineForest wrote: ↑Thu Oct 31, 2024 10:05 am
wab wrote: ↑Thu Oct 31, 2024 8:37 am
2016 to 2021 is a 6 year span. Does Poles get three more years to invest?
This is how I feel, too.
Next year, if OL is drafted R1 and R2, you could have:
R2 2021 (Jenkins)
R1 2023 (Wright)
R1 2025 (Draftee)
R2 2025 (Draftee)
R??? (FA signing - could have high draft status)
Would that suddenly mean the bears have invested in OL in the draft? (not directed at you, @wab - more of a rhetorical question).
I would say yes, but we'll see if he actually spends his top 2 picks there or not. History suggests that he won't do that. There's 3 legs to this discussion: Draft investment, FA investment, and then the evaluation side of either the draftee or FA signing. He has to get one of the first two right and the last one right for it to work and have a good OL. His failure thus far hasn't been singular, he's invested a little too light for my taste and has compounded that by failing to hit on his evaluations too frequently. 3 full off seasons into Poles tenure, and the best OL on this team wasn't even acquired by Poles - he was drafted by Pace. That's just not good enough.
He failed to invest properly in the draft in Y1, taking a smattering of late round prospects. But he did hit on Jones at least, which saved his Y1 grade a bit. We weren't in a position while tearing down to spend on FA so I don't ding him for not investing in FA at that point. I do ding him for not drafting aggressively into the position group. Patrick signing was a miss but a low cost miss.
In Y2, he failed on evaluations. Nate Davis was a big fail and was his biggest cash investment into the position, that's a huge miss that he can't have if he's also not investing heavily enough. I credit him for spending a 1st round pick on Wright though, and that evaluation right now is TBD I'd say. He chose to ignore the C position in the draft for a second straight year.
In Y3, he spend a 3rd round pick on a developmental OT prospect and signed Bates, Shelton. Shelton has really turned things around and seems like a decent signing at that price, BUT I'd still argue he failed to invest properly here. There were better C prospects available, several of them, and he let them go elsewhere. And he again passed on drafting the C position when there were several good ones coming out. Just feels like another year of underinvestment in the position group.
In Y4, will he change his stripes? I sure hope so by I don't have my hopes up based on his track record. Sometimes you have to step back from the minutia and take a broader view of a longer time frame to see the bigger picture. This is one of those cases. We can debate each individual signing, draftee, or guys that we chose to pass on in FA or whatever - but that misses the overarching point and more importantly the results. When we signed Poles to be our GM, we all thought he would finally fix our OL problems, that was his calling card - and it's just indisputable that he has failed to do that thus far.