Introduction
One of the reasons I love the Windy City Gridiron community is because the members try to have engaged and thoughtful conversations in the comment threads, and the quality of discussion attempts objectivity and evidence-based reasoning even if all of us let our emotions come into play (we are, after all, fans). One question that has been asked in different forms repeatedly is how does Ryan Poles compare to prior Chicago general managers in terms of his skill at drafting?
To answer this question, I
needed not only to look at the draft records of Phil Emery and Ryan Pace, but I also needed external reference points who succeeded in steering a team to at least one championship. I chose Jason Licht’s first three years, who took his team to the Super Bowl after a long stretch to get there, and Howie Roseman (widely considered the exemplar of NFL general managers) beginning when he resumed personnel control in 2016. I chose them because like Poles (and also Pace), they drafted quarterbacks within the top two picks of the draft over their first three years and because they had idiosyncrasies that reminded me of Poles. Licht spent a high pick on a special teamer (Robert Aguayo with a second-round pick) and Roseman lacked a first-round pick in one of his first three years.
Methodology
This next section gets a little dense, and is mostly for my fellow football nerds. For each “general manager interval”, all the players drafted will be compared to all players drafted from 2011-2020 at their same position and draft round; because of the distinct advantage of the first eleven spots in the NFL Draft, however, that is considered its own separate round (Round 1A).
The first five years of each player’s career will be compared on at least four data points–games played in the first five years, games started in the first five years, and at least two forms of production. For players who have not yet played for five years, their performance to date will be prorated to that level, cross-checked by the available data on how two-year markers develop into five-year outcomes, and then noted in the text with the potential error range discussed. In the event of ties (for example, the player has 45 starts, but so do four other players in his round and position), the player will be credited with the highest possible position. These will then be averaged for the player’s Value Percentile. The only exception is with punters and kickers, who are excluded from this component.
Each GM class and interval will then have all of their Value Percentiles averaged together, weighted by Chase Stuart’s Expected Value draft chart. Stuart was chosen because conventional draft trade charts disproportionately scale off as the draft continues. Notably, for this component the value spent on punter or kicker is applied, which therefore penalizes GMs who spend draft capital on these players. That is not an oversight in the methodology but rather a deliberate element of design. Most importantly, though, this means that GMs are evaluated based on the typical performance of the picks they actually made, and they therefore are not penalized for picks that they did not have.
Each draft class (GM+Year) will then have a rank 0-100 that indicates how well the GM drafted compared to the rest of the league when considering draft position and available resources, with 50 being average and 100 being perfect. Note that this methodology does not penalize GMs for unbalanced trades nor does it reward GMs for trading efficiency–it is purely about how well the GM actually drafted.
Reference Points
Jason Licht: Licht took over in 2014 and his first pick was Mike Evans. The rest of that class was poor with the exception of Kevin Pamphile, but he was able to get an elite wide receiver and a starting tackle, which was enough to score a 62 for this class (which again, just means that by weight of draft expectation, his class averaged a performance in the 62nd percentile. 2015 saw Licht draft Jameis Winston, Donovan Smith, Ali Marpet, and Kwon Alexander among others players who left less of an impact. This yielded a 78th percentile score. Then the sail came off the rigging a bit, and Vernon Hargreaves, Noah Spence, and Robert Aguayo dragged down some late round magic that found four players all in the 60s for their draft spot. Still, this class was a 38. Overall, though, when weighted across all twenty draft picks, Jason Licht’s first three years on the job netted him a score of 61. This was a solid start to his career, but there was fluctuation up and down.
Howie Roseman: After assuming personnel authority and bringing in a new head coach, Roseman quickly took his team to a championship and strung together eight of ten winning seasons to date (including a second championship). Despite these accomplishments, his first year drafting on his own brought in modest returns (59), but notably every pick in that draft besides one of the three 7th-rounders was at least a little above average. 2017 was more up and down, and it came in at a 54. However, 2018 was a stunningly competent draft despite not having a first-round pick. Every selection was at the 79th percentile or higher, with an overall value of 82. Overall, Roseman was at a 61 in these three years, and it was a 61 powered by 16 of 21 picks being above average and 10 picks outside of first two rounds being above the 70th percentile. Just quality throughout. The man crushes the draft.
Phil Emery: If I’m honest about my own biases, I have always thought of Phil Emery as a man who was decent at drafting but who was undone by one or two bad picks and a terrible selection at head coach. It turns out that I should have been more critical of his drafting. His first year was torpedoed by taking Shea McClellin, but the reality is that only Alshon Jeffrey was an above-average pick–this year was a 36. Most of 2013 was solid, but the back-to-back misses on Bostic (23rd percentile) and Green (25th percentile) meant that even Kyle Long could only drag the class up to a 52. Finally, he hit with Kyle Fuller but every other pick in 2014 was at or below the 40th percentile, and he ended with a score of 43. Notably, even Fuller took a few years to bloom. His overall value? Also a 43.
Ryan Pace: Part of me simply wants to use Ryan Pace as another reference point in assessing the current GM in Chicago, and to that regard it’s easy to simply report the overall results–across his seven years, his average score works out to be that he drafted in the 52nd percentile, or completely average. Given what he gave up to get some of those picks he made, it’s simple to make the argument that his drafts weren’t worth the trade capital, and that a pair of bad GM decisions plus the quarterback selections undid him. That’s all true. However, it’s worth looking at how those results came to be, because they are informative on many levels, some of which have significance for the current state of the Chicago Bears. That will be a distinct article, however, so those people who are tired of reading about Ryan Pace can simply skip it. For now, though, it’s worth pointing out that while there was a general upward trend after Matt Nagy replaced John Fox, that trend was fragile.
Percent “Good” here refers to what percentage of picks were at least at the 50th percentile. Notably, the curve is consistent between the two measures despite the disproportionate value given the top picks.
Ryan Poles
While it only takes three years to judge a draft class, the Draft Codex that powers this work uses five-year and two-year intervals, so there will be a certain amount of projection in this assessment. However, 30% of the draft picks made by Ryan Poles from 2022-2024 have not played a snap in the league since 2024, and so it’s probably safe enough to say that their performances are set. Another 20% are already such outliers at their position (for better or worse) that any movement is unlikely to change their relative rank very much. Of the remaining half of all draft picks, performance profiles are moderately stable, but there are three exceptions that need to be noted that could change these outcomes.
Darnell Wright has yet to win a Pro Bowl, and because there are so few reliable stats for offensive linemen, the Codex does use that as a performance marker for offensive linemen. If that changes in the next two years, it would see his tier move up, and since he represents a major draft investment that would benefit Ryan Poles significantly.
Tyrique Stevenson has a very high composite score because of how frequently he plays even if he doesn’t start and because when he plays he enters the stat sheet. If he were to play less for some reason, and he did see less play at the end of 2025, that could lower Poles’ score.
Kyler Gordon’s injury history currently has him in the 43rd percentile for games played, and his overall metrics suffer as well. Should he get healthy and have a significant increase in playing time over the next two years, he would defy projections there as well and that would increase Poles’ overall performance here.
With those disclaimers out of the way, Poles’ first three years in the league project to have him land in the 64th percentile. Here’s how he gets there:
- 2022: Drafted in the 56th percentile, with six of eleven picks performing above average for their draft position, but with no outliers at or above the 70th percentile.
- 2023: Drafted in the 64th percentile, with the top of the draft (Wright and Stevenson, with Dexter to a lesser extent) pulling up an otherwise mediocre class despite making ten picks.
- 2024: Drafted in the 69th percentile, with two functionally wasted picks (Amegadjie and Taylor) dragging down the above average performance of Caleb Willams and Austin Booker to land the entire draft class in line with Rome Odunze.
Interestingly, Poles has also trended upward each year, and he has sustained that trend for three years already, unlike Licht or Pace. But what about his overall performance? Well, compared to the rest of the GM draft cycles in this limited study, he does fairly well.
He has the highest percentile score overall, and even beats Licht and the “Fox + Pace” years for percentage of draft picks being at least “good” overall. He’s not as consistent at finding quality players as Roseman, but that’s a high bar to clear. Notably, though, he has not found very many true gems yet. To be fair, the methodology could be hurting him, here. It is hard for even a player to be an outlier in the Top 11, and much of Poles’ draft value is concentrated in a small handful of players. But there’s more to the story, which will be covered in Part 2.
For now, though, the simple conclusion is that over the first three years of his career with Chicago, Ryan Poles drafted at a level that is consistent or better than the performance of at least two Super Bowl-winning GMs and with a degree of success that is measurably better than his two immediate predecessors, but that while he is improving steadily he has room to grow before he becomes as capable as the best in the business.
