Ryan Poles Used An Actual GM Interview To Help Trade #1 Pick

Ryan Poles didn't set out from the beginning to trade the #1 pick. He went into the off-season with an open mind. While he did seem settled at quarterback with Justin Fields, there were seven players in the 2023 class he considered blue-chip caliber. That means he believes they have a high probability of being good in the NFL. Taking any of them would've been fine with him. However, it soon became clear that there was legitimate interest from several teams in the 1st pick. With so many holes on his roster to plug, it made more sense to trade it.

The tricky part was finding the right partner. Several teams were interested, from Houston to Las Vegas and Tennessee. However, the Carolina Panthers soon emerged as the most aggressive. Poles had a good relationship with their GM, Scott Fitterer, having gotten to know each other on the scouting trail for years. There was one other advantage Poles had in negotiations. One that proved serendipitous. He explained it to Albert Breer of the MMQB.

“There were some other opportunities, some hopping around to go from one to two, two to nine, that would have been pretty cool,” Poles says. “The thing was, instead of being greedy and trying to do all kinds of fancy things, I felt like, when we hit a certain point, I was satisfied.”

And satisfied, in part, because of his relationship with Fitterer, born of the years the two spent together rising through the ranks as scouts, and also because, since Poles interviewed with Carolina in 2020, he had a good feel for how focused owner David Tepper was on finding a quarterback.

Ryan Poles used all the information he had to his advantage.

Imagine that. A young executive used information acquired three years prior in an interview to help secure his team a blockbuster trade. That shows how observant Poles is and how well he retains information. Carolina was entering a brutal purgatory phase at quarterback in 2020. They tried Teddy Bridgewater that year. In 2021, they took a big swing on Sam Darnold from the Jets. A year after that, they tried again with Baker Mayfield. All proved to be costly failures.

So Ryan Poles knew by this off-season that Tepper was bound and determined to get a quarterback his franchise could build around. That would require the #1 overall pick. So the Bears used that knowledge to their advantage, securing three extra draft picks and a go-to wide receiver in D.J. Moore. Everything about the deal says Poles got it right. He struck a delicate balance between helping his team immediately and setting them up for the future. It's amazing to think a seemingly unrelated interview from three years ago helped make it happen.