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[Icege]

12 hours ago, Panthercougar68 said:

Oh I’m subscribed, when he did the 3 parter on Sean McDermott I signed up but he’s got a lot of good stuff I read.

Ooo. How often do they put stuff out? I might just do a year since that's almost 50% off a month

[Icege]

11 hours ago, Mr. Scot said:

Good Lord

Oh it gets BAD bad.

[Icege]

Went ahead and paid for a month from Go Long so that I can check out the McDermott article as well... but hoooooolyyyyy shiiiiiiiiiiit does this paint Caleb Williams in an awful light...

 

[Icege]

No wonder DJ was looking so pissed off up there last season

[Icege]

 

[Icege]

Wild reading some of the dark fantasy scenarios some Huddlers have proposed about Bryce only to see it actually happening in Chicago with Caleb.

[Icege]

This is insanity.

 

[frankw]

I've said all along Ben Johnson is likely in for a rude awakening in Chicago. The Bears are an extremely dysfunctional organization and have been for decades now. I'm not going to throw stones though. There's still a whole season of upcoming football to play. And the fact of the matter is even with that QB and that staff they bullied us. IMO this will either be a decent season or a top to bottom train wreck for our Panthers. And if it's the latter there will be plenty of info coming out that will paint folks in our org in an unfavorable light. Take this 24 hours or so to enjoy the brief bit of peace here.

[Martin]

34 minutes ago, Icege said:

This is insanity.

 

Thanks for sharing. This is fascinating stuff. I know some of us were hesitant with him due to his limited play within structure in college and the need to constantly relying on hero ball. But his lack of ownership and lack of work ethic is staggering.

[Icege]

8 minutes ago, Martin said:

Thanks for sharing. This is fascinating stuff. I know some of us were hesitant with him due to his limited play within structure in college and the need to constantly relying on hero ball. But his lack of ownership and lack of work ethic is staggering.

The kid is clearly talented but there were numerous red flags regarding his maturity.

Quite literally everything that the doomer and haters have insinuated about Bryce has allegedly been going on with Caleb.

• "rigged" scouting process to favor one prospect
• not enough focus on football (CoD vs. Netflix)
• teammates/coaches didn't want him
• coach killer

Absolutely insane that the Panthers might actually come out of that trade the victors. Hopefully for Caleb  and the Bears he can figure things out and right the ship... but I wouldn't be totally upset seeing the Bears go back into QB purgatory.

[Icege]

Oh damn, all three parts are posted.

Quote

The more we dig, the more it’s clear why the Bears have one winning season since 2012.

• In Part I, we reveal how 2024 spiraled out of control through the eyes of those coaches. A season that included extreme frustrations, a near benching, a late-season revelation and mass firings. “A shitshow,” one says.

• In Part II, we revisit the farce of a draft process that led GM Ryan Poles to select Williams No. 1 overall. One personnel man recalls the charade as “rigged.”

• In Part III, we zoom out: Who’s to blame? The Bears have become an organization repellent to independent thought. The GM inherited a bad situation and managed to make it worse with a 15-36 record. All roads in this league tend to lead back to ownership.

Starting Part II now.

[Icege]

Wooooooooooooow...

Copy/pasting since I'm having issues with dark mode in Firefox

Quote

The worst football moments of Drake Maye’s collegiate football life were plastered on the screen for all to breathe in. This was no accident. Multiple people inside this 2024 draft meeting say they knew exactly what Ryan Poles was up to. “He’s not sneaky,” recalls one scout, “and he thinks he is.” The Chicago Bears general manager, it appeared, was implanting the worst possible first impression he could inside the minds of his personnel men.

It wasn’t pretty. Under constant duress, he completed less than half of his passes vs. Clemson. He ran for his life vs. Miami.

Clicker in hand, at the center of the room, Poles repeatedly hit rewind on errant passes and it didn’t take long for those echoes of “Geez!” to turn into outright laughter. Poles and his confidants were not interested in sparking a substantive conversation about the North Carolina quarterback. This draft meeting resembled a bully in the high school cafeteria seeking toadies — any veneer of scouting objectivity was shed.

Maye escaped free runners, threw at awkward angles, sailed incompletions. At times, the spiral of his ball was off. Other times, the receiver broke in and the ball was thrown out. All funky plays were magnified and mocked to make it appear as if this is exactly who he’d become as a pro quarterback.

Poles chimed in.

“This tape makes my chest tight,” one source recalls the GM saying.

All but a select few scouts broke out in laughter.

One brave soul did speak up. Chris White, the team’s assistant director of pro scouting that spring, called out Poles. “We’re dragging this kid through the mud,” he said. North Carolina’s receiving corps was hurting that final ’23 season. White asked his boss to show another game out of fairness. So, he did. Maye started gunning NFL-level throws downfield and White spoke up again. “I like that there,” he said. Two narratives were now clashing. Poles didn’t hit rewind on these plays. Inside the room, one scout recalls the mood turning tense.

After negative plays, Poles made a wry comment: “Dirt ball there” or “You like that, too?”

Laughter picked back up. The team’s area scout, Ryan Cavanaugh, flatly stated that he didn’t believe Maye was a very good player and Poles jumped in to reset the temperature of the room. “I agree,” he said.

Eventually, the GM set the clicker down. “This guy,” he repeated, “makes my chest tight watching this.”

Case closed. Maye was stacked out of the first round.

“They made fun of him,” says one Bears scout in the room. “They laughed. The GM laughed Drake Maye off the screen, and cut the tape off.”

Jayden Daniels wasn’t stacked much higher. The Heisman Trophy winner who filleted defenses with horsepower the sport hadn’t seen since Lamar Jackson was never a serious contender for the No. 1 pick. Not once, sources in the room say, did Poles open up the floor to ask a simple question: Who’s a better quarterback: Caleb Williams or Jayden Daniels? “Jayden Daniels was clearly — clearly — a better quarterback,” says one scout. “If he didn’t want to go with Drake Maye, Jayden Daniels was clearly a better quarterback to anyone with an eye.”

And when it was time to discuss Williams, the tenor in the room changed drastically. His film was massaged in a manner to present the USC quarterback at his absolute best. Nobody dared to chuckle. The Bears didn’t dissect his wretched performance against Notre Dame on tape, only discussing that three-interception, 48-20 defeat through rose-colored glasses. No magnifying glass was panned over this quarterback’s flaws.

To those seeking a vibrant debate, these draft meetings were a farce.

“The quarterback process? I would not even call it a process,” says one scout in the room. “The Caleb Williams draft pick was the most embarrassing lack of a process — a fair, impartial process to scouting — that I’ve ever seen in my life. There wasn’t any type of actual comparison on a fair slate to which quarterback is actually better.

“They had it all lined up. It was a rigged trial.”

Reality is, the decision was likely made long before the decision was even discussed.

 

[Icege]

Quote

In Part II of our series, Go Long continues to chat with Bears sources — past and present — to guide you through a draft that witnesses paint as a slap in the face to everyone who fills Soldier Field on Sundays. Several other GMs and execs around the NFL share their own odd interactions with Williams. And we explore what easily could become the next all-time “What if?” in Bears history — the Jayden Daniels whiff — because, thus far, the juxtaposition in how the two players work is jarring.

Finally, we’ll examine this new union: Williams and new head coach Ben Johnson.

The honeymoon period is over. Game No. 1 is closing in.

Years from now, when all legacies for all six quarterbacks taken in Round 1 of the 2024 NFL Draft are written in stone and the lessons are obvious for all 32 teams, a few private words spoken by the Bears GM may ring loudest. Words two team sources will never forget.

Into December ‘23, right as the Bears’ brass shifted its focus from the season to the QB class — to Caleb Williams — they recall Poles saying out loud: “If I don’t take him, the media will kill me.”

“That is fireable,” says one Bears scout. “If you’re making picks for the media, then you might as well have Mel Kiper be GM. That’s just ridiculous. That’s not a general manager. The general manager is supposed to be the captain of the ship. He’s supposed to be the best evaluator on the staff. I cannot believe a general manager would actually say that out loud.”

There are teams that maniacally dissect every conceivable option when presented with the first overall pick in the NFL draft, teams that encourage 12-round brawls in draft meetings to ensure the best player is selected. Argument is a must.

Then, there’s the Bears.

Quote

He’s a man on a mission walking these halls. Head down, face in the phone, you’re lucky to get a hollow “hey” in passing. Employees in several departments paint the same picture of Ryan Poles, their boss, inside Halas Hall. They describe the GM as transactional. Unless you’ve got a title above his own — unless there’s a service you can provide him — Poles cannot be bothered.

Stranger than any aristocratic insolence is what Poles obsesses over on that tiny screen.

Those in coaching, scouting, equipment, marketing, digital and the support staff insist this GM is terminally online. He scrolls and scrolls to get a pulse for what narratives are building in the public sphere. “Did you see this post on Twitter?!” he asks those close to him. Poles is “infatuated,” one vice president says, with what the Bears’ own social media team is tweeting… not tweeting… right down to who’s featured in specific photographs. He carves out time in his schedule to pitch ideas to the team’s media department. Optics reign supreme.

“I’m like, ‘How about getting an idea for getting a fuging first down,’” this source says.

OK, fine. The dystopia is here. One scout realizes the younger generation lives on a phone and admits Poles isn’t any different than most adults in their 30s. Countless millennials try to sell a perfectly manicured life to the masses. That doesn’t make it any less weird to see his boss pushing narratives that don’t necessarily mirror reality. Cameras are everywhere shooting the Bears’ in-house TV show, “1920 Football Drive,” and Poles ensures his fingerprints are all over the final product. “Crafting the narrative,” says this scout, “and editing things to make it look the way he wants it to look.” This all began on Jan. 31, 2022 at his introductory presser.

These Bears, he promised, would “take the north and never give it back.”

“Of all the people I’ve worked with,” one scout says, “and I’ve worked with a lot of different people at different levels — he doesn’t really believe what he’s saying. He pretends to. That was very cringe.”

One GM for an AFC team who knows scouts back in Kansas City, where Poles’ NFL career began, has heard good things. Well… other than one small detail. “They thought he was full of poo,” he says, “taking credit for Mahomes when he was interviewing.” The Bears, who infamously passed on the Texas Tech gunslinger, devoured whatever this GM hopeful was peddling. And it did not take long for the new boss to see a Mahomes of his own in the form of a USC quarterback hopscotching through Pac-12 defenses that 2022 season.

Oh my damn

A former Huddler that frequents the Discord has been pounding the "Ryan Poles is a trash GM" drum all last season and this article continually reaffirms the criticisms that were being discussed at the time.

It's giving Matt Rhule.

Edited 2 hours ago by Icege

[Panthercougar68]

Thanks! I couldn’t post that stuff since I have my dumb phone and I’m out of town.