← Forward Progress - A Chicago Bears Podcast
Forward Progress - A Chicago Bears Podcast
NIL is changing NFL prospect evaluations by NFL, Ryan Poles and the Chicago Bears
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What's your Mount Rushmore? I don't know. Listen, wherever you get podcasts, I mean, if you're a Bears fan, you're thinking forward Progress. Come on. Forward Progress, a Chicago Bears podcast with Dan Bernstein and Matt Abenicola on 312 sports forward progress on 312. And I'm solo with you today. So we're just going to hang out and talk a little bit of Chicago Bears and football. I found something that I found really interesting, and I didn't think it would bother me ultimately as much as it did, but I read a piece that is not sitting all that well with me, and there's some Bears history to this, and I'm going to explain why this bugs me and maybe it bugs you as well. And we're going to go back to something that happened. That was not a particularly pleasant chapter for the Chicago Bears, but it was over quick and as. As it should have been because I'll remind you of this. You'll go, oh, yeah, okay. So what I want to bring up is a piece in the Athletic written by a guy named Mike Jones a few days ago. And the gist of the piece, the headline is how the NIL era has Changed NFL evaluations of Draft Prospects for Good and bad. I thought, okay, I think this will be really interesting. And Mike Jones got some extended quotes from. From some NFL execs that had no problem putting their name on it. And I think you should hear some of the stuff that came from Ryan Polls because I will say that polls took the high road on some of this. And I was, and I the, the moment I saw he was quoted. Well, down in the piece, unless you read the whole thing, you're not going to find these quotes that Mike Jones got. And I have not read these anywhere else. But this is Ryan Polls and I'm a start here because I think you should hear from the Bears GM first before I get into what bothered me. Here's Ryan Polls talking about the difference that the ni whatever you want to call the new landscape of revenue generating college sports has become with NIL transfer portal, et cetera. Jones writes that some general managers can view prospects who haven't handled money swimmingly as a blessing in disguise. Theorizing those early lessons will position the players for more sound decision making early in their NFL careers. So here is polls. I like to follow the whole journey. I don't hold it against an 18 year old that gets a million bucks to go to school and maybe didn't have his priorities straight. Most of us here, if that happened to us, we'd want to do some crazy things too. Or maybe not focus where we should be focused. But I want to see the learning lessons that come from that. I want to understand their structure of the people they put around them. I want to understand how they battle through adversity. I think the toughest thing is when there's an option to transfer. When things get hard, we hurt the resilience of our young players. So I want to learn through that and understand how they grew throughout their ordeals. That doesn't mean we'd eliminate everybody, but we want to know what's coming in the building we need to lean into because I think we have to pick up some of that education on our side now. That's great. I love the way Ryan Poles handled that when it comes to that's very, it's parental, it's understanding. What did these young men go through that has made them something in which we want to invest our resources and our money? But what bothered me are some of the other reactions here. And in the second paragraph of this piece, Mike Jones says, well, what are you going to get with your first signing bonus? Talent evaluators would often ask in their early face to face interviews with prospects of the NFL's annual scouting combine said traditionally the prospects had toiled in the amateur ranks for three to four years, honing their skills with visions of professional contracts, life changing riches dangling before them. But everything changed five years ago. Gone are the days of penniless college athletes. So too is the level of desperation prospects felt to make the jump to the pros as quickly as possible. Multiple GMs estimated that around 25 potential top 100 draft picks elected to stay in school rather than apply for early entry, leaving the NFL and its teams with a shrunken talent pool. And many of the prospects opting for the draft find themselves already in a place of financial security. Some have earned millions during their college careers, dwarfing salaries of NFL players earning a veterans minimum, others a few hundred grand. But transformational finances no longer rank among the chief motivating factors for draft prospects. So they talked to Joe Shane of the Giants. We're always trying to evaluate hunger. It used to be, what's this kid gonna be like with money? What's he gonna do now? These guys come to the league, they have money. So now it's how much do they love football? Would they do it for free? We're always trying to analyze it. That's what our scouts do. So if you're thinking, does this remind me of something? There's something in my Bears memory that is stirred by this. And I'm going to call you back to 2022. This is when Jaquan Brisker was drafted. You starting to remember it a little bit now? Because I remember being really off about this. This was Bears national scout Chris Prescott talking about Jaquan Brisker. Okay? They drafted Brisker, 48th overall. And here is what the Chicago Bears national scout said. Quote, he's a. What do we call it? A PhD poor, hungry and desperate. Football is his life. This is the kid's life. There's a lot to like about that when you see a guy who's so passionate about football. It was Courtney Cronin, who has been on this pod multiple times, who got that quote for espn. So that that's Publicly, the national scout for the Chicago Bears say, oh yeah, poor, hungry and desperate. That's how we like him. That, that then we know he's got to play really hard. He's got to give us everything. He's got to listen to authority. He's got to be. We got to pat him on the head and say good job. You're. You're doing everything you're told, young man, because you are poor, hungry and desperate. And the note here from Mike Freeman of USA Today, who said if, if Prescott talks about players like this publicly, imagine what he says when out of view. And his point being, and this is a national column, anyone who speaks and thinks this way shouldn't be part of a 21st century NFL franchise. Expressing this sort of glee about a player being poor, hungry and desperate is quite the take. Well, guess what happened. If you remember, and I do, the Bears fired Chris Prescott very shortly thereafter. Chris Breast Chris Prescott no longer worked for the Bears because how embarrassed everybody was. But this kind of shit is they still talk this way. They still do. And remember what happened with the Bears. That's when Brandon Faber was the vice president of communications and then the Bears fired him and then he went to work for Bill Belichick, I believe. But USA TODAY Sports was told Prescott is no longer with the team. He could not provide information on whether Prescott was let go as part of the normal post draft turnover process in the scouting department or whether his dismissal was due to his comments. But for whatever reason, we should be grateful for Chris Prescott pulling the curtain back, showing what some in the league truly think about players that see players as cattle or as things. Parts of the NFL see players as things that may have some elements of humanity, but not quite somewhere between a robot and a shell of a man. And what Mike Freeman wrote was black players are viewed as even less than that. There's almost an exponential downgrading of their humanity and we don't have to get into that at all if you don't want that was that was Mike Freeman's comment, though it's one that I certainly agree with. And here is a case of a whole article being written now in the Athletic about boy, hey GMs, hey NFL GMs, how can you deal with this? They're now essentially asking the they're not poor, hungry or desperate anymore. Does that make it more difficult for you to bring them into your system instead of saying, oh look what we have come here Instead of the it's sort of a bastardization of what's written on the Statue of Liberty. Instead of your poor, your tired, your huddled masses yearning to be free, it's your poor, your hungry and desperate learning to break their brains for our amusement and, and entertain us as our modern gladiators on a football field. I hated that when I saw it. And now I'm reading this now. It's like, how, how can the NFL, how could they possibly deal with these football players who may actually have money? Oh my goodness. They're not poor and desperate anymore. What's that gonna do for their hunger? Won't somebody think of the NFL? I hate this shit. I really do. And so asking this, like this is some sort of big question about what can the NFL possibly do now that they're not hungry and desperate. And I gotta sort through these quotes just to make sure that NFL GMs are showing a proper bit of humanity in this, where you get. The Giants are like, yeah, well, I don't know. You know, we don't know how hungry they are. Would they play for free? Is it that important to him? Please, please, I. You can be your own judge here. Elliot Wolf of the Patriots, he's the executive VP of player personnel and he at least says the following. I think you can look at that in two different ways. Maybe they're coming in a little bit more entitled, but on the other hand, they're coming in more prepared from a business standpoint. Like they've had money, they know what it's like. They have some financial literacy and understanding the trials and tribulations that come with that. So I think it's a double edged sword. It's like anything, you have to be able to adjust and every person can be different. Good. I like what Elliot Wolf said. Understanding, you know, you know what? These, these, these people are people. Maybe they're just people rather than these robots. Oh, he's a PhD, PhD out there. Hey, poor hungry, desperate. Bring on in bringing these poor, hungry, desperate, he gonna play hard for us. Like, this is something that the NFL is going to be caught off guard to understand. Boy, if we can't dangle the riches of the NFL, ooh, look what you're going to get. Look how hard you have to play. I know, hurts, but boy, it's. You gotta play really hard. Look at all this money you might get someday. And now they're like, nah, I'm good, I got money. And there, this is something the NFL has to somehow figure out for it even to be painted in that context. I find a little gross. It's, it's a Little icky think, well now the NFL has lost the ability to lure poor, hungry, desperate kids because they're not as poor, they're not as hungry, they're not as desperate, and the poor NFL can't find a way to deal with that. I didn't like the tone of this necessarily and that's why I read the Ryan polls stuff first. It's why I read that first, because I was a little. You get worried about your, your GM locally. How does he handle it? And, and I thought that of all the responses, Ryan polls handled this the best. He handled this the best. He looked this at this as simply a. The responsibility of the teams themselves to be able to learn more about the players and to under. To empathize with them. How about the empathy from Ryan Poles here? How about this? I don't hold it against an 18 year old that gets a million bucks to go to school. Maybe didn't have priorities straight if that happened to us. We do some crazy things too, not focus on where we should be focused. I want to see the learning lessons that come from that. I want to understand their structure, of the people they put around them, how they battle through adversity. Okay, all you did was change your scouting criteria a little bit. Is that so hard? Oh, no. Our job got more difficult. People can't come running to us because they want to, because they've got no money to help their family. What are we doing here? Like to, to write this as one thing to lose sight of what actually happened with a Chicago be. To not understand that we had somebody say the quiet part out loud. We know this has always existed at every level of football. Football's hard and a lot of people don't want to do it. They end up doing it because they have to, because it's their way to elevate their standing or to help their families. We know all this stuff and, but, but, but the way it was at 1.4 years ago, openly celebrated that this guy, the Chicago Bears national scout, was the guy who was like, ew. If you're like, he really said that you want a guy poor, hungry and desperate so you can exploit him. You are articulating the concept of professional exploitation. And now that you can't do that, say, oh, geez now, boy, life was sure better when we could exploit these poor, hungry, desperate kids. It was sure easier on the NFL. And this doesn't get written unless a reporter's hearing about it. The way these things happen is when he go, when Mike Jones goes to his editor And I'm done. And I'm. I don't want to be too hard on Mike Jones here because my guess is he's hearing it from GMs, like, Geez, you know, our jobs are really different now. We got guys who, who turn us down, you know, you know, well, you know what? You might have guys who don't want to play football at all anymore. And that's okay too. That's okay too. But just because the power balance has changed because you don't have all the power on your side anymore, ain't no fun when the rabbits got the gun. Welcome to it NFL. Welcome to the fact that you don't, you can't hold that over em anymore. You don't have all, oh, look at us, big old pot of money over here. And we can make you do things and run you through these drills and make you feel like a piece of meat and drag you through every kind of testing, physical and mental and psychological and everything else, because we're the ones that hold the purse strings right here. Well, you know what? You don't anymore. And that's good. That should be celebrated when the balance of power is swinging back in that way. And for a reporter to start getting wind of it, that's how these things get written and said is, geez, you know, this isn't as easy as it used to be. We can't just go dangling money in front of kids and have him jump at us. He. Does he love football? Does he love football? Is football important to him? Boy, he lives and breathes and sleeps football. It's all that matters in his life. Well, you know what, Maybe that's because he hasn't had anything else. He's finally got some resources and some choices because he's got some power. And sadly, it's only money that brings that. But in end stage capitalism, that's where we are. And you can be as sad about that as you want, but I think it's good. I think it's great that you have college players with a better opportunity to dictate their own choices, to have agency, to have actual agency, because they've been compensated at an earlier age for essentially being professionals in that sport. But because the NFL's had it so easy for so long that you start getting these whispers like, boy, our, our jobs are tougher now. We, we can't tell how much somebody loves football. We, we, we don't know. Because the only way they could prove it before, the only way we'd believe them is if we could Go and. And see their childhood home and know the poverty they came from and know how poor and hungry they. And desperate they were. Well, it, it sucked to hear it then. And I don't like the fact that this kind of stuff is permeating the NFL apparently in front offices enough to rise to this level. And good on Ryan Polls for hearing these questions and being able to give his answer from a professional and empathetic place. Good on him because yeah, you're damn right you better adapt and you might have. You better have a better pitch than just money. What's the. Like anybody else choosing a job, what's the workplace like? Do I. Is, you know, when, when you're being interviewed and soon, if in fact players can eventually have more power to. To exert over the draft itself of where they want to go and why they would go there and where they would consider resigning. And as that swings back, I hope the NFL, if nothing else, gain. Gains some empathy and doesn't feel like they are. They're continuing to have outsized power over desperate young men because I don't, I don't. I don't want to root for that. It's already hard enough to root for, for these guys doing what they're doing to themselves physically. It's already difficult enough. I don't need it to be more difficult. And I think if you're a Bears fan, it's easier for you to feel better about the way the Bears are handling this business than perhaps some of the other teams. We got some other notes here on the Bears as well, because what do I always say about a mailbag? And especially when it's Brad Biggs, Never miss a mailbag because he gets to choose the questions he answers. He's answering the. The questions he wants the way he wants. And there are few people who are as in touch with any NFL team like the football man from the Trib is with this team. There's a couple notes in here about where they might find some money if they got to renegotiate some deals. He was asked if can they shock the world and trade up for Jeremiah Love? And he said it'd be an expensive move to make. He said if in fact they had to get up, he said they. They'd have to. Love would have to fall out of the top 10 for it to be a conversation. And if they were at number 11, a pick owned by the Dolphins, the Bears would have to part with a package that would look like number 25, number 57 and number 89. If they were simply swapping 20, 26 picks. So then the Bears would have love if they wanted him a second round pick at 60 and a fourth rounder at 129 before 2 7. This puts him in a tough spot to add an edge rusher. So that's what we're all concentrating on is edge rusher from this draft. We seem all agreed that that seems to be where they're going. Zion Young out of Missouri is a name that everybody likes there and has been mocked to the Bears. I love the fact that we're using it as a verb in that regard because he keeps answering this question about the Bears adding a veteran pass rusher. The names keep changing as to who that might be, who's floating around. But you know, first you start with Max Crosby and Trey Hendrickson and now people are asking about Von Miller or Jadevion Clowney and this keeps being answered the same way by Biggs and others, he said. I wouldn't ever rule it out, but they've reached the point in the off season where they will wait to see what the draft brings before reassessing what secondary moves need to be made. After the first and second waves of free agency teams want to reset and focus on the draft. Then there's a chance to reassess what holes might remain and they'll consider veterans whom other teams might cut loose. If the Bears sign Miller, Miller's going to be 37. He's 37 today, actually. Happy birthday Von Miller. Jadevian Clowney, 33 that still doesn't address the fact that the pass rush is the biggest issue. This is about Austin Booker stepping up. This is me now that this is about Austin Booker stepping up. And this note that was key to this because this is Biggs who believes asked a question. Do you have any sense about whether the Bears are committed to Shamar Turner playing defensive end where they moved him before the injury? So this is a paragraph here that you should hear. My hunch is we will see Shemar Turner at end when he is fully cleared and back on the field after recovering from the torn ACL weekend. The initial plan was to use him at tackle and things got delayed when he suffered a sprained ankle at the outset of training camp. Nothing would preclude the Bears from playing him on the interior, but in the short period from when Turner got healthy until he suffered the torn acl, the sentiment was he might best serve the team playing end. All right, okay, so if in fact last year's second round pick who we're pretty excited about seeing, you know, the negatives on him were impulse control. The negatives on him were the ability to stop hitting people after the whistle or maybe even before the whistle or between plays, or he had a tendency to keep punching people in the balls. And I'm saying it's the worst instinct in the world as an NFL player. I mean, you don't want to walk down the street doing it. Although it does happen here occasionally at an L platform. Somebody will just walk up and punch you in the face, I guess. But I don't mind having. I'd rather coach that down than coach that up because it might just be high. Motor might be a complete maniac, or he might have impulse control issues, which, by the way, and if I just as an aside, watching the Bulls and the Rockets, when IME Udoka got a. Got a technical and they said, well, as good as he is, that he has a problem sometimes with his temper. And I was thinking maybe with our old friend ime, we want to talk about impulse control beyond just the temper. That's. I'm thinking that if there's anything. If we've got a through line here with the IME Udoka issues, it's not just anger or temper. It's impulse control, being able to stop doing things, I guess. But that's not why you called Turner at end. Interesting. Very. If they think, hey, you know, just. Just wait, you want to talk about this year's pick, but we got a guy nobody saw, really last year that nobody saw this guy get regular rotation at end. And if. If. If Biggs is saying the sentiment was he might best serve the team playing end, I don't know if that changes. And if it's an A, if it's an isolated acl, that's not a patellar tendon tear. That's. That's not talking about, you know, shoulder complications, they can pop in that no one, he can build it up and be okay. There's. All. The league is filled with guys coming off torn ACLs who are just fine eventually. And, you know, I hate to say that, but I can, because I had a torn ACL and a complete knee construction, and I'm still a. So it doesn't really change anything, but I like that idea of don't forget about him. As we're looking at all these possibilities and all these new guys, don't necessarily forget about the possibility that Shemar Turner is going to be an interesting choice out there. Now Austin Booker matters more, and Austin Booker has done everything to think the next step is coming, that the next step is there. And I don't know if it is, but they liked him. Polls liked him. He's going to get every chance. Last note here is talking about Kaden Proctor saying if in fact Kaden Proctor is available at 25, basically asking Brad Biggs, do you like him? And for those of us who are still out of Atticola, still that worried about left tackle, completely fair. What Big says is you're I don't believe you'll find a consensus franchise left tackle at number 25 in this or any draft. That franchise player means one of the best in the league at his position and if there's somebody viewed as that good, he's going to come off the board a heck of a lot earlier in this draft. It is going to be difficult to identify a left tackle who's that level of prospect. And regarding Proctor, obviously 67352 but this is the note. He'll probably be a right tackle in the NFL, inconsistent in pass protection when he has to play in space. Some have even suggested he could ultimately wind up playing guard. I that that's the first I've heard that about Kaden Proctor about possibly playing guard. I thought he's way too athletic for that. But maybe left guard with his athleticism and speed. If you are looking at him that uses a lot of pulling motion and does a lot of that power stuff, then maybe he'd be a fit there. But it was something I did want to note and that's what I got for you today. I know as as baseball as everything is at the moment and happy opening day. Thanks for stopping by and talking a little bit of football with me. Dan Durkin is going to be our guest tomorrow, so we'll get in the weeds a little bit with some of the scouting stuff and some of the Bears depth chart stuff. Wait to do that. But that is Forward Progress a Chicago Bears Podcast for your Thursday. Thanks for being a part of it. Forward Progress is stopped. Forward Progress a Chicago Bears podcast with Dan Bernstein and Matabatacola on free.
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