The 2026 season will mark Ryan Poles’ fifth season as general manager of the Chicago Bears. Things are trending in the right direction for his regime, seeing as though the Bears won the NFC North last year and won their first playoff game since the 2010-11 season.
It took a little while for things to get rolling, but Poles has the Bears trending in the right direction heading into 2026. It hasn’t been all sunshine and rainbows, as I highlighted when ranking his five worst moves as the team’s general
manager. However, in order to get his team into the playoffs and winning double-digit games, you clearly have to have done some things right.
After shining light on the bad, let’s do the same with the good. These are Ryan Poles’ five best moves as the general manager of the Bears.
Honorable Mentions
- Drafting Luther Burden III in Round 2
- Drafting Kyle Monangai in Round 7
- Surprising everyone by taking Colston Loveland in Round 1
I’ve put three of the Bears’ 2025 draft picks into the honorable mentions list because the players are all so early in their NFL careers. However, their draft haul looks to have strengthened an already strong offensive foundation on their roster, and that’s not even including the encouraging flashes Ozzy Trapilo showed at left tackle before he got hurt.
Luther Burden III is an elite YAC threat who was incredibly efficient last year, to the tune of his ranking No. 11 in the NFL in PFN WR Impact Scoring. Colston Loveland ranked No. 6 in their corresponding metric for tight ends, working the seam and stretching the field much better than the average tight end, especially among rookies. Kyle Monangai also proved to be a tough, tenacious runner who served as a stellar complement to D’Andre Swift. All three selections have aged incredibly well thus far and could certainly move up these rankings in due time.
5) Intelligent cap space management
This isn’t one specific move as much as it is an overarching theme in Poles’ tenure as the Bears’ general manager. When he took over in the role, his predecessor Ryan Pace left the Bears in the bottom 10 in cap space. With an aging roster that clearly wasn’t going to compete, Poles inherited several bad contracts, releasing several overpaid veterans and trading others who still had trade value. In his first year as general manager, Chicago led the NFL with over $93 million in dead cap.
Some of that dead cap carried over to 2023, but in each of the last three offseasons, the Bears have had a tremendous lack of dead cap space compared to what Poles inherited early on. They ranked 26th in dead cap in 2024, 32nd in 2025, and 22nd in 2026. The DJ Moore trade is eating most of that dead cap this year, and there will be no dead cap on him or any other 53-man rosterable player in 2027, as of this writing. That’s a testament to how well Poles and his regime have managed their finances.
4) Acquiring Joe Thuney for a fourth-round pick
The Bears traded for Joe Thuney last offseason when he was already 32 years old, so they went into their trade with the Chiefs knowing the move would likely be a short-term one. That said, coming off a 2024 season in which Chicago had significantly struggled to keep Caleb Williams upright in his rookie year, they desperately needed stability along their offensive line.
To say that Thuney gave them stability at left guard would be an understatement. He was outright dominant in 2025, earning the inaugural Protector of the Year award in 2025, along with first-team All-Pro and Pro Bowl recognition. His presence helped give Williams a much more clean pocket than what he had in Year 1, and Thuney’s consistency in their run to the playoffs made him such a valuable asset. Though the Bears lost the game, his ability to kick outside at left tackle and perform well in their Divisional Round game against the Rams was admirable, too.
3) Picking Caleb Williams over Justin Fields
To our readers who aren’t as active on social media, I’ll simply say that you made the right decision in the late winer and early spring of 2024. The Bears Twitter Civil War was the most divided I’ve ever seen this fanbase. I was aggressively in the camp that drafting Caleb Williams with the No. 1 overall pick in the 2024 NFL Draft was the easy choice. That’s proven to be the correct take through these last two seasons.
One could certainly argue that Justin Fields never got the right opportunity in Chicago, given the instability in offensive coordinators, head coach, and a lack of a strong supporting cast around him. I’m in agreement with that, and it’s a shame that his full potential was never unlocked with the team. But stints elsewhere in the NFL have shown that Fields’ weaknesses have remained the same throughout his career. Williams displayed from Year to Year 2 significant growth, and he demonstrated a level of play in 2025 that few past Bears quarterbacks have been able to match. That’s admittedly not a high bar, but Williams has the makings of a true franchise QB.
2) Hiring Ben Johnson as head coach
It felt like, going into 2024, that Matt Eberflus was a lame-duck head coach who should’ve been fired after the 2023 season. The Bears gave him one more years, and their collapse down the stretch of 2024 was comical. Though firing Eberflus midway through that year felt like it was long overdue, it certainly worked out for Poles in retrospect.
Ben Johnson had went on head coaching interviews as the Lions’ offensive coordinator after the 2023 season, but he ultimately chose to stay in Detroit for another year. The timing worked out perfectly, as Johnson’s decision to stay put ultimately ended up with him in Chicago. He’s carried over his intelligent brand of offensive play-calling and schematic design that he showed as an OC, and he’s proven that he’s a capable leader who brings out the good, better, best in his players. Johnson is arguably a top-five offensive mind in the NFL right now, and I can’t think of the last time I could say that about anybody the Bears have ever had in their organization.
1) Trading the No. 1 pick to the Panthers in 2023
As predictably well as Poles handled the 2024 quarterback situation, and as riveting as the early returns have been on Johnson, Poles’ magnum opus remains his trade with the Panthers leading up to the 2023 NFL Draft. One could argue that it’s already one of the most one-sided trades in NFL history.
The Bears earned the No. 1 overall pick in the 2023 NFL Draft, thanks largely in part to late-game heroics by Texans quarterback Davis Mills in the final game of the 2022 season. Poles chose to trade down from that spot, moving down the No. 9 pick and swapping selections with Carolina. The Panthers used that first pick on Bryce Young, who has yet to finish in the top 30 in PFN QB Impact Scoring. In return, the Bears got a haul that would shape the future of its franchise:
- DJ Moore: A bonafide WR1 at the time of his acquisition who had 3,012 receiving yards in three seasons in Chicago. Trading him to Buffalo this offseason net the Bears draft capital to acquire Sam Roush, Malik Muhammad, and Keyshaun Elliott
- Darnell Wright: A stalwart right tackle who earned second-team All-Pro recognition in 2025
- Tyrique Stevenson: An inconsistent yet still talented starting cornerback who has provided an upgrade over what the Bears had at the position in 2022
- Caleb Williams: The new cover athlete of Madden. The NFL’s leader in fourth-quarter comebacks in 2025. The quarterback who led the Bears to their first NFC North crown in seven years and their first playoff win in 15 years. Swapping Williams for Young straight up would be a massive steal in and of itself
- Tory Taylor: The fourth-round pick the Bears acquired by moving back one spot in the 2023 NFL Draft in the famous Jalen Carter-Darnell Wright swap. A serviceable starting punter whose acquisition price was steep by punter draft stock standards, but one who has been a considerable improvement over his predecessor, Trenton Gill
- Luther Burden III: A dynamic athlete at wide receiver whose YAC ability, ball skills, raw explosiveness as a route runner, and developing route tree made him a focal point of Chicago’s offense in the second half of his rookie year
When discussing Poles’ best moves as the Bears’ general manager, his trade with the Panthers in 2023 has to come up first.
