Ryan Poles and most of the Chicago Bears front office felt Caleb Williams was the right pick at #1 overall last year. Things didn’t go as hoped. The rookie looked unsettled and outright lost at times. He wasn’t helped by a coaching situation widely considered among the worst in the NFL. Yet some would already have you think the quarterback is a lost cause. It is nothing more than the Mitch Trubisky situation all over again. They took the wrong guy. At least that is how Tyler Dunne of Go Long has painted it.
His recent column revealed a lot of supposed red flags about Williams going into the draft. He didn’t have a great work ethic, did not take notes, and looked unprepared during the workout the Bears held. Worse still, Poles rigged the pre-draft process by making it seem like Williams was the only logical option. Jayden Daniels and Drake Maye were afterthoughts. However, there was one dissenting voice in the crowd. One of the team’s scouts apparently fought back against the idea of taking Williams.
Then he got fired for it.
The only resistance amid the laughfest came from one of the team’s top evaluators: Chris White. And when White advocated for that Tar Heel quarterback being mocked on the screen, he was completely shut down. Poles appeared “annoyed” and “pissed off,” one source says, that Maye was even brought up. The tape was eventually shut off — for good.
“The guy was basically announced as a joke,” one scout adds. “Poles is basically saying Drake can’t even play in the NFL.
“Chris was the only one with the balls to call out the truth. Instead of taking that — which you should as a general manager — and saying, ‘My best evaluator is trying to tell me something,’ Poles really made everything harder on him. Which is the opposite of what it’s supposed to be. It’s supposed to be a discussion in there. There was none.”
Not surprisingly, White is no longer with the Bears.
There are serious issues with this Caleb Williams story.
While it is certainly plausible that White spoke out against the quarterback in favor of others, the idea that he was the team’s top evaluator needs some context. For one, White was a pro scout. Since arriving in 2014, he spent his entire time with the organization on that side of the scouting department. He never once dabbled in the college end of things. So to say he knew immediately that Williams wasn’t the guy is presumptuous.
Then there is Dunne’s assertion that White was fired because he spoke out. There is zero evidence to support this, especially when White took a job as Washington’s director of pro scouting, a promotion from his role as assistant director of pro scouting in Chicago. The Bears didn’t push him out. They let him leave for a higher position elsewhere.
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Dunne offered zero proof that White was pushed out. He merely let people speculate that was the case. A martyr was needed, and he was as good a one as any. Meanwhile, Caleb Williams is left taking the hits for something out of his control.