As I’ve said, the Dan Pompei interview with Bears president Ted Phillips is providing a lot of food for thought. Here’s an answer that caught my eye:
“How do you feel about the criticism [general manager Jerry Angelo] sometimes gets?
“Personnel is not an exact science. It takes a little luck. He’d be the first one to tell you we need to do a better job in the early rounds (of the draft), and we do. The flip of that is he’s done a really nice job of finding key players in later rounds and through trades and free agency.”
Sounds reasonable and its more or less true. But consider this comment made by Angelo to Neil Hayes of the Chicago Sun-Times at the Combine last month. Hayes asked if there were going to be any changes to the draft philosophy this year:
“”It’s not nuclear Neil. It’s the same. We’ll do some things a little bit differently, we had a change, we looked at the bottom part of the draft and how we wanted to evaluate it differently this year so we made some changes that way… But nothing.”
Phillips says (and I agree) that the Bears success in the draft has been in the later rounds. So Angelo has apparently decided that’s the part of the draft process that needs to be changed.
Am I missing something here?