Dan Wiederer at the Chicago Tribune gives fellow writer Sean Hammond his take on an issue related to how GMs handle their board during the draft. It’s a long response but a good one so I quoted it in full.
True or false? Ryan Poles’ goal to have the Bears big board speak to them during the draft was a grounded, sensible approach.
Wiederer: I’m all for practicality. I’m all for draft discipline. And I do think resisting temptation is the safest route to avoid forcing the issue at certain positions.
In this particular draft, the Bears board spoke loudly about the running back position in a way that pushed them in different directions and toward other positions over each of the three days.But… (and you had to know there was a big “but” coming), it feels obligatory to point out that the pride every front office across the league feels about its draft board is at a minimum a display of overconfidence. It may even register as misguided.
After all, Sean, what can we say definitively above all else about the draft? It’s that the boards, in totality, are always wrong. Always.
Over time, that has been proven again and again and again — whether you’re a basement draft prognosticator or a veteran NFL GM. The prospect rankings are always off. And while we don’t know specifically how or where each board is flawed in the moment, we learn over time as highly drafted prospects underperform and fall out of the league and later-round underdogs become stars.
So why is it then that every NFL GM feels obligated to treat his draft board as an answer key rather than acknowledging it for what it really is — a best guess and rough estimate of how the talent evaluation team sizes up players.
That’s why I don’t pull the confetti poppers when GMs celebrate their marriage to the board. It’s why I’m a little skeptical of Poles’ oft-repeated goal in this draft of letting the board speak to him. As much potential as [second round pick Luther] Burden seems to have, did the Bears really need another wide receiver right now instead of finding, say, a starting left tackle, a dynamic running back, a talented edge rusher or a young safety? On Day 3, did they really need to make a dice roll on speedy linebacker Ruben Hyppolite II rather than address those aforementioned positions?
I’ll close with this. Listening to the draft board often feels prudent and reassuring. But we have proof that the Halas Hall draft board is often a fountain of lies.
In 2022, for example, the board steered Poles toward Velus Jones Jr. over Kerby Joseph, Nakobe Dean and Brian Robinson Jr. The next year it pointed to Zacch Pickens over Tank Dell and De’Von Achane.In 2019, Riley Ridley was a had-to-have “best player available” when Dre Greenlaw, Andrew Van Ginkel and Charles Omenihu were on the board.
And by now, you certainly know the history of 2017, of Trubisky over Mahomes, of Shaheen over Kittle (and Mixon and Kamara and Kupp and Godwin and Hendrickson). So, yeah.
A couple thoughts here.
First, though he was far from perfect, I have always been a big fan of the way that former GM Jerry Angelo handled the draft. Angelo always said that you should never, ever fall completely in love with a player. There are no “must have’s” in the draft and its because of exactly the reasons that Wiederer points out. Its an imperfect process.
Former GM Ryan Pace‘s greatest flaw was that he thought that acting with “conviction” was the best way to handle player acquisition. Everyone was a “must-have,” and he overpaid for players that weren’t as good as he thought most of the time because of it. Trading up for Trubisky is a prime example.
Getting back to the present, I have generally had no problems with the way that Poles has handled the draft. But I’m not at all convinced that he stuck slavishly to his board. Word is that the Bears had Shemar Turner rated higher than Ozzy Trapilo but that the disappearance of the offensive tackles in front of them, especially Anthony Belton two spots ahead of them, convinced them to take the offensive tackle while they could still get one that they liked.
In this respect, I’m also looking at the pick of TE Colston Loveland instead of former Georgia defensive end Mykel Williams. The 49ers were glad to punce on Williams when the Bears didn’t take him. Via Michael David Smith at nbcsports.com.
San Francisco head coach Kyle Shanahan said GM John Lynch was trying to trade into the Top 10 to get Williams, but the 49ers’ offers were turned down.
“We had a good idea he was going earlier, and you don’t actually know. We thought about going up and John definitely attempted. . . . But they shot him down,” Shanahan said, via 49ers.com. “And so, we were ready to watch him go away and we were ready to go to our second and third, but he didn’t go where we thought he was going to go. Then we got to our pick and I was like, ‘I can’t believe you tried to trade there, of course he was coming [laughter].’ So that’s our thing about the draft, you never know. But we stuck there and waited for our guy and we got the guy we wanted.”
It’s possible that the Bears didn’t like Williams as much as the 49ers. But I think that few neutral observers would argue that they need the pass rusher far more than another tight end.
The Loveland pick smacks of the possibility that new Bears head coach Ben Johnson insisted that he get another Sam LaPorta for his offense, even though Williams, a defensive player, might have been the better pick.
In fairness, scouts will say that, though teams draft the “best available”, the best available tend to be at the positions that teams need because those needs are in the back of everyone’s minds as they evaluate the prospects. So it’s possible that Johnson’s desire for a tight end drove the player rankings.
Either way, no matter what Poles says, I don’t think that he slavishly followed a draft board where all of the prospects were fairly evaluated for talent.