Weekly Commentary and Review # 1

Bears copying the Chiefs rebuild? EPA is going mainstream (good and bad), and ranking the best "playmakers" in the NFL

I’m gratuitously stealing this concept from another Substack to which I subscribe, accumulating some shorter thoughts and analyses on things that catch my eye during the week.

Not everything demands a full article treatment, yet sounding off on a micro-blogging platform like Twitter also doesn’t do the trick. I’m going to use this space to highlight a few articles I read during the week that I have commentary on - positive or negative - and how we can use our understanding of sorting the signal from the noise.

BEARS COPYING THE CHIEFS REBUILD?

Chicago Bears GM Ryan Poles

ESPN’s Courtney Cronin’s combo profile-and-analysis of the Bears GM Ryan Poles and his rebuild strategy showed up on my “Top Shared Articles” on Twitter, so I gave it a look. The theme of the article was “How Bears GM Ryan Poles was influenced by the Chiefs' rebuild”, and setup is right at the top of the article:

CHICAGO -- In a modest apartment not far from Kansas City's Arrowhead Stadium, Ryan Poles pondered his future. It was 2009, and he was a Chiefs scout, grinding for an organization that was bottoming out.

Three years later, Kansas City finished 4-12, the worst record in the league, triggering a rebuild. The blueprint of how the Chiefs transformed from bottom-feeder to two-time Super Bowl champs could serve Poles well in his current position as Chicago Bears general manager.

As he enters his second season in Chicago, Poles finds himself at the beginning of that arc. The Bears finished 3-14 last season, worst in the NFL. It set up one of the biggest offseasons in franchise history, from having -- and trading -- the No. 1 overall pick to developing a possible franchise quarterback and surrounding him with the right players.

“Could” is doing a lot of work here, but it’s offseason hopium season, so connecting the NFL’s worst team in 2022 to the best is a great formula to trigger the natural optimism in the air. Superficially, it makes sense that Poles, who spent his formative career years in the Kansas City Chiefs organization, will bring what he learned to his job leading the front office in Chicago. But rebuilds take many shapes, often dictated by the state of roster when the team bottoms out.

Getting past superficialities, what are the concrete markers of the Chiefs rebuild that Poles “could” follow now with the Bears:

Patience was at the core of the Chiefs' rebuild, but Poles also saw how quickly things can accelerate if the team hits on key moves. Less than a month after finishing 2-14 in 2012, the Chiefs hired coach Andy Reid and haven't had a losing record since. Reid's first priority was to improve the culture in the locker room, and that included trading away talented players, including All-Pro cornerback Marcus Peters, who clashed with some in the organization. In 2017, Reid and the Chiefs made their most consequential move, drafting quarterback Patrick Mahomes.

The Bears and Poles certainly needed to be patient in their rebuild after inheriting a poor roster to start the 2022 season, and cap constraints that took a year to simply dig out from under. The Chiefs rebuild, on the other hand, was anything but patient. After hiring Andy Reid in the 2013 offseason, the Chiefs immediately traded away two second round picks to acquire Alex Smith from the 49ers, one of the picks being highly valuable at the beginning of the round. According to Cronin, Reid’s first priority required trading talented players, yet the one explicit example is Marcus Peters, who was on the roster in 2013 and wasn’t traded until the 2018 offseason, five full years and four playoff appearances after Reid took the reins. Finally, drafting Mahomes in 2017 was, indeed, the Chiefs most consequential move. But it was, again, detached from the rebuilding process by five years by the time Mahomes took over as starter in 2018.

So how did the Chiefs reshape the roster in the 2013 offseason, other than previously mentioned trade for Smith. There’s not much via trades, with a bust-for-bust swap of Jonathan Baldwin for A.J. Jenkins, sending kicker returner and part-time defensive back Javier Arenas packing, and trading part-time defensive end Edgar Jones to the Cowboys for a sixth round pick. In free agency, the Chiefs and GM John Dorsey were praised for being the most active team in the offseason, far from displaying the “patience” posited as the core of the Chiefs rebuild.

The Chiefs rebuild wasn’t patient at all, because it shouldn’t have been. The Chiefs entering the 2013 offseason were fundamentally a solid team, having hit the worst variance in quarterback ineptitude (32nd in EPA per dropback with Matt Cassel and Brady Quinn) and defensive regression. By being aggressive and impatient trading away draft picks for Smith, the Chiefs added a high-floor passer whose skill-set meshed well with Reid’s West-Coast offense pedigree, going from last in EPA per dropback to 13th, and raising the Chiefs overall offensive efficiency from last to the top-10. The Chiefs defense also improved from last to top-10, but the previous year’s result was an outlier for a roughly league-average defense the two prior years. In fact, of the seven Pro Bowlers on the Chiefs 2013 squad that improved the team from 2-14 to 11-5, every one but Smith was already on the roster.

"They were sitting around a campfire and they asked him, 'What are your goals? Where do you see yourself in five years?'" Mary Ellen Poles said. "And he said, 'I'm going to be a general manager of a team.'"

The middle section of the article should really be the focus, with good background on Poles, his time working through the Chiefs organizations, and how he didn’t get discouraged while being passed over for jobs in previous hiring cycles. I want to be explicit in my praise for this section, yet this wasn’t framed as an article to learn about Poles, but how he and the Bears are copying the Chiefs rebuild.

Poles began revamping the roster almost immediately, trading Mack for a 2022 second-round pick and a 2023 sixth-round selection. He was an active trader during his first draft, making four moves that netted five players, including fifth-round offensive tackle Braxton Jones, who earned offensive All-Rookie honors.

Poles is following the Chiefs' blueprint.

"It definitely rubs off on you," he said. "Build through the draft.”

As discussed earlier, the Chiefs didn’t trade away any important players as part of the rebuild, and they also weren’t active trading in the 2013 draft, other than sending the 34th overall pick for as part of the Smith trade. And the initial rebuild didn’t build through the draft, other than spending the No. 1 overall pick on Eric Fisher and a third-round pick on Travis Kelce, the former a good tackle but not a key piece of the 2013 squad that improved to 11-5, and Kelce didn’t play at all as a rookie recovering from injury. Eventually, the Chiefs hit on a bunch of picks, Kelce included, but that wasn’t the driving force of the rebuild that sent the Chiefs to four postseasons from 2013 to 2017.

Poles is hoping he found his Reid equivalent in Matt Eberflus, who was hired as head coach two days after Poles joined the Bears. The two had met a couple of years earlier when they played golf, appeared on a podcast together and stayed in touch.

Okay, now we’re just squishing names together for the sake of the theme whether it makes sense of not. Eberflus might be a great coach someday, but he has a diametrically opposite profile to Reid coming into the job. Reid was recognized as an offensive genius and a highly successful head coach for several seasons, taking the Eagles all the way to the Super Bowl. Eberflus is a first-time head coach from the defensive side of the ball. Maybe they have some similar personality traits, but the resumes are completely different.

EPA ANALYSIS ENTERING THE MAINSTREAM