With just two days left until the NFL Draft kicks off in Las Vegas, Chicago Bears GM Ryan Poles met with the media and provided some insight into the team’s draft plans. While it’s more than apparent there are definite needs at a few positions, Poles appears ready to not give in to any panic. How’s he preparing to handle such situations once teams are on the clock? Full blown draft simulations.
#Bears GM Ryan Poles says the team has spent the last few days simulating the draft at Halas Hall to make sure everything is streamlined, including having people call in with proposed trades.
— Brad Biggs (@BradBiggs) April 26, 2022
Those online mock draft simulators are a great way to pass the day, but Poles’ setup has to be quite the simulator for him to be doing this multiple days. Just how many simulations they’ve gone through and how they concocted the trade offers are the real questions. Yet while this is all a much different approach than what we were accustomed to hearing about from previous Bears regimes, the different methods didn’t stop there.
When it came to building their draft board and ensuring they had the right players in the right spots, Poles and the scouting department incorporated anonymous polling of rankings to avoid “groupthink” scenarios.
Ryan Poles introduced a few processes in his draft meetings with college scouts. While watching tape as a group, they'd use an anonymous poll system to vote on players by position and then players on how they stacked up against the rest of the board to see how they ranked.
— Courtney Cronin (@CourtneyRCronin) April 26, 2022
With an exercise like this to shake up the room, scouts are obviously being a little more open with their favorites and criticisms that they may not say out loud. Poles went on to say “It allowed everyone to put their thoughts and ideas down and it takes that out of it. You see it. I put it on the screen and you could hear the oohs and ahhs. It was a really cool exercise.”
The biggest takeaway we may see from this approach is the Bears finding they are much higher on a player than the league’s consensus this weekend. Could they get completely roasted because of it? Absolutely. Is it the best approach to come to the right conclusion? We’ll find out just a short few days from now.
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