Ryan Poles and The Poison of Losing

I am unapologetically a Bears homer. I believe in the Bears. One of my first examples to classes this year was an optimistic screed on why you should believe in the Bears too. I thought they had it with Justin Fields until they didn’t. I thought Caleb Williams was going to walk in and be the QB we always dreamed of. I thought (and think) Ben Johnson is a uniquely gifted coach. That’s all to say that one thing (or person) I never believed in for a second was Ryan Poles.

As the Bears stare down the barrel of another “rebuilding” or “retooling” or “developmental” season, it’s easier to just call it what it is, another wasted season. That will make a perfect four for four in the Ryan Poles era. It’s the only thing even close to perfect thing about his tenure. The Bears have had all different kinds of bad GMs, so what’s the big deal with Poles? He’s just another one in the line. But at least for me, he brings out an anger because he loses just like all the rest of them but he encouraged losing from the minute he walked in and got exactly what he asked for.

He walked in the door and as soon as he was done saying his infamous line of “we’re going to take the North and never give it back” he got on his way towards losing on purpose. Ryan Pace left him a mess was the claim, they had a bad cap situation, an aging roster and the only solution was to build a team in 2021 to lose. Anyone with a real vision could have found another way; anyone can destroy something whereas building and sustaining takes effort, dedication and skill. It’s no surprise which path a zero like Ryan Poles chose.

Losing is poison. It seems like that should be obvious in the context of professional sports but sports organizations and especially sports fans have gotten drunk on the idea of purposeful losing. You see, we have to lose now in order to be good in the future. The nomenclature that sports have adopted is “tanking” and it has berthed multiple industries of draft prognosticators, farm system evaluators and a dozen other professions that specialize in theoretical sports. There is always debate among sports fans regarding the effectiveness of tanking but the fact is that of the four major sports, the tanking model is at best, flawed to the point that any decision maker who embraces it should be called what they are asking to be called until proven otherwise: a loser.

In baseball, the tanking process is a multi-year process in which even the best outcome relies on draft picks who won’t play for the major league team for 3-5 years in most cases and prospects acquired from other teams in exchange for real, honest to god major leaguers who 1) the team that knows them best was willing to part with and 2) data indicates that somewhere near 90% of prospects never reach a career WAR of ten. The Cubs can call what they did from 2021-2024 whatever they’d like but it was tanking. They traded all their good players for prospects and embraced losing on purpose. They made the playoffs as a wildcard yesterday. Yay! All it took was four years of losing on purpose to finish second in their division. They lost the interest of at least one fan during that time.

In basketball, the logic at least holds up a little bit better. One player can change an entire franchise. No doubt about it. Logically, that one player should be the #1 pick in any given draft. The problem is that a #1 pick hasn’t been named MVP of the league since 2013. You could argue that the Oklahoma City Thunder, the reigning champs of the league tanked successfully and they did. But they never had the #1 pick, their best players came from a trade and the 12^th overall pick. Competence is way more valuable than blind luck, who knew? Not to mention their model has been tried by franchises like the 76ers and Pistons with absolutely nothing to show for it. For every successful tank and rebuild, there are five that flamed out spectacularly.

In hockey, admittedly the sport I know the least about in terms of ins and outs, you can chase a generational player like Sidney Crosby or Connor McDavid. The Penguins have something to show for it, the Oilers don’t. Not to mention, in a league in which even the best players in the world play only 1/3^rd of the game, depth and quality across the board is way more valuable than one player acquired due to total futility. The last #1 pick to win a Cup with the team that drafted them was 2014 top selection Aaron Ekblad with the Panthers in 2024. A whopping ten years from tank to top.

Which brings us to tanking in football. To start, the reason the NFL is the king of sports is because of their parity design. While the tip top best teams still rise to Super Bowl level with regularity, the NFL manages between 4-7 new playoff teams per year. The schedule is crafted in a way to allow teams that were bad the year prior to find success against similarly matched teams. The last two seasons, the team which held the #2 overall pick in the draft, meaning they had the second worst record in the NFL, the Texans and Commanders, made the playoffs the following year. The league is designed to keep every team in the mix as much as possible.

Tanking for the #1 pick gets you a shot at a franchise changing quarterback, at least that’s the logic. At the moment there are four or five true elite quarterbacks in the NFL depending on your definition: Josh Allen, Lamar Jackson, Patrick Mahomes, Joe Burrow and maybe Jalen Hurts. One of those guys was a #1 pick, Burrow. Mahomes, Allen and Jackson were first round picks but (sometimes infamously) passed on by multiple teams. Hurts lasted until the second round. Competence: 48,302 to Blind Luck: 1 and that’s just the practical explanation of why tanking is for losers.

Football is the most dangerous sport in the world. Players are subjected to multiple car crash level collisions every week. Players break their necks, damage their spines and inflict lifelong injuries to their brains. It’s a brutal sport. No one is forcing the players to do this so I’m not crying about that but the idea of asking players to go play this sports and risk life and limb while simultaneously operating under the guiding principle of: “but make sure you lose,” is the worst sports has to offer. Players complain that they feel like they’re treated as pieces of meat, as numbers to be cast aside once the team is done with them. It’s the brutal reality of the league but to do it in service of intentional futility? It’s hard to argue with their point of view.

Ultimately, teams could argue they are simply dealing with the reality of their situation. Ryan Poles argued that his roster and salary cap was in such a spot that losing was his only course of action. Obviously, I disagree with that from both a football and philosophical standpoint but I don’t have the bandwidth today to go blow by blow on how royally Ryan Poles fucked up this roster. You also might find it hard to elicit sympathy for professional athletes making anywhere from 500K to 40 million bucks a year to play a game rather than getting an actual job. Fine. The problem with tanking at its core is also its central idea: losing.

In education, there’s no shortage of snappy one-liners to offer advice or sum up a tricky situation. One that keeps rattling around my head when it comes to this Bears franchise is when it comes to behaviors: you either teach it or you allow it. In this case, Ryan Poles came in and taught an organization that was already pretty familiar with losing, how to do it on purpose. Once it was soaked deep into the foundation of this roster, it was allowed to become a habit. They beat the Packers backups last year. Other than that they have lost 12 straight games. They have players noticeably quitting during games. They have players walking off the field while a play is in progress. They have players celebrating minor accomplishments like a tackle after seven yards or having a lead after 59 minutes of a game. Losing attracts losers. Is it any mystery why Ryan Poles has acquired guys like Nate Davis, Chase Claypool, Tremaine Edmunds, Montez Sweat and D’Andre Swift? Players allowed to leave better teams and organizations sucked right up by Ryan Poles. He sees himself in them. Frauds, losers, weaklings, whatever else you want to call them.

The reason the Bears are terrible is because they have been allowed to be. Losing is a habit and the Bears have it bad. How do you fix it? Realistically, probably the rallying cry of fed up sports fans across the nation: sell the team. In practice? Maybe Ben Johnson comes in with a blowtorch and lays waste to the losing culture. The problem with that is there might not be anyone left once he’s done, setting up a multi-year process yet again. The actual course of action will likely be inertia. Poles has been extended; he will continue to set draft picks on fire, hand out bad contracts and wax poetic about how good his “culture” is. Johnson might be a good coach but can only make a plate of chicken salad out of a mountain of chicken shit. This franchise has been intentionally infected, deep into its bones with the most toxic substance that can be found in professional sports: losing. To anyone paying attention it seems very likely that they may never recover.