This was worth the grueling wait.
Bears general manager Ryan Poles stepped into the job in 2022 and had no choice but to burn down the roster in the first phase of a massive rebuild. He tried to develop the flawed quarterback he inherited. Losses piled up.
But Thursday signaled the end of that arduous project when he swung big on a trade for All-Pro defensive tackle Jeffery Simmons. He made that move thinking the Bears can win the Super Bowl this season, and it’s the first time in his five-year tenure he’s truly been able to make a move with that mindset.
“It's a different feeling,” Poles said as he thought about the journey. “We've done a lot of good work to put ourselves in this position.
“To be in the space that you're chasing championships, whereas we were just trying to get off the ground the first couple years that I was here, I feel really good about it.”
Big trades always are fun at the time. Just ask Ryan Pace. The more important part is how they play out over years.
Poles needs this move to vault the Bears to the Super Bowl and needs to be correct that the Bears are getting Simmons at the optimal point of his career.
On the first point, they already were in the conversation for the Super Bowl, albeit on the outskirts. They’d still be an upstart looking to upend teams like the Bills, Rams, Chiefs and 49ers, as well as an underdog in their visit to the defending champion Seahawks on Monday. But attacking one of their biggest weaknesses by landing arguably the NFL’s best player at that position could put them on equal footing.
As for Simmons, while there’s risk in trading two first-round picks for a 29-year-old, he’s still squarely in his prime at that position. It’s reasonable to expect a star defensive tackle to hold up through at least his early 30s, and the Bears have him under contract through 2030.
Poles had to be incredibly confident on both fronts to pursue the trade.
He also had to be as sure as any general manager can be that his roster, especially quarterback Caleb Williams, was championship-caliber and that this was the time to go for it.
“The ‘all-in’ narrative is there, [but] from the moment we started training camp this year we were all-in,” Poles said.
After watching his patient, conservative approach and his priority of “sustainable” success, it was hard to imagine him ever giving up two first-round picks in a trade. Way outside his comfort zone. Poles had to be so convinced that he was willing to bet his job on it.
Rams general manager Les Snead famously wore a t-shirt that said, “[Expletive] them picks,” at their Super Bowl parade after he mortgaged his team’s future and came away a championship in the 2021 season. Poles referenced that unprompted Friday and clarified, “That’s really not what we’re about.”
So please stop all the memes. Snead's catchphrase is the opposite of Poles' ethos.
Poles got this job, after all, because Pace followed a similar strategy only to go 6-11 that same season. Poles has been determined to prevent the Bears from bottoming out the way they did in 2021.
If there was any position other than quarterback, though, that he believed would justify this expense, it’d be on the defensive line. And defensive tackle, in particular, has been a persistent problem.
He valued it enough to offer Larry Ogunjobi a sizable contract in 2022, even as he was in demolition mode. The Bears rescinded the offer when he failed their physical, then spent a second-round pick on Gervon Dexter in 2023. Poles went back to free agency in the 2025 offseason and spent on Grady Jarrett.
None of it revolutionized his defensive line, and Poles lamented it as he watched teams like the Seahawks, Eagles and Chiefs win championships with dominant defensive tackles.
“Super Bowl teams all have what we call a ‘red-level’ interior defensive lineman,” Poles said. “You need one.
“We’ve been searching, but sometimes the draft doesn’t provide that to you. Free agency doesn’t really [provide them]; it’s very hard for guys to get out of the building when they have all of those things that we’re talking about. [Simmons] was an opportunity that we had to jump on.”
When Poles works on trades like this in his office, he has a replica of the Lombardi Trophy the Chiefs won when he was an executive for them behind his desk. He talked to reporters wearing a navy quarter-zip with the Bears’ “1946 World Champions” logo on the chest. In a Sun-Times interview two years ago, he spoke admiringly of Theo Epstein leading the Cubs out of their championship drought and openly dreamed of doing the same for the Bears.
“If you get that right,” Poles said then, “that’s legendary stuff.”
This is him throwing his hardest punch. He’s got the coach and the quarterback, and he’s hoping Simmons’ impact will ripple through the defense. The rebuild is over. The chase is on.
