The moves a general manager makes speak louder than anything he says into a microphone, and the message from Ryan Poles this offseason has been as clear as could be: The Bears want to maximize whatever they can possibly be this season.
They talked about that last August, but it was the world’s worst-kept secret that the upcoming season would be a burn year in their rebuild. It would’ve been counterintuitive to add veterans, especially pricey ones, to a team that was going nowhere.
Poles reinforced the shift from demolition to actual construction, though, when he signed defensive end Yannick Ngakoue and tight end Marcedes Lewis a week or so into training camp. Ngakoue, 28, is a necessary solution to a glaring need, and the 39-year-old Lewis has a wealth of lessons from his 17-year career that Poles would like his young roster to learn.
Ngakoue is the more substantial acquisition and upon arrival was the team’s most proven pass rusher — more so, even, than DeMarcus Walker, whom they signed in the first wave of free agency for $21 million over three seasons.
Ngakoue is flawed and he has bounced around the league, but he has had a minimum of eight sacks every season. No one else on the roster has ever hit that number.
Everybody said the Bears desperately needed help, and some even took their concerns directly to Poles. He said a third-base coach at one of his son’s baseball games yelled it to him this summer, and beachgoer in Maui intruded on his family vacation to make sure he grasped the urgency.
“Finally got that done,” Poles said in deadpan.
Why the delay, though? Because Poles still has to be careful as he walks the fine line between ambition and patience. The Bears’ push this season is for a playoff spot, not the Lombardi Trophy, so he can’t do anything that ruins his opportunity to keep building next year.
Ngakoue wanted a multi-year contract from a team contending for the Super Bowl, something he said publicly in June. From the time he started getting grilled about this in April, Poles’ comments consistently indicated he needed to contain this commitment to one season.
“It’s really the contract, all of that, as well as kind of prioritizing who’s out there and what the draft was going to look like,” he said. “We had to navigate all of that to finally come to this.”
It’ll be a bit before either new player is on the field. Lewis was at Halas Hall on Saturday but did not practice, and Poles said Ngakoue went home “to get all of his stuff and close up shop” and likely will start practicing Tuesday.