THEY CHOSE MOORE OVER MORE
Bears might’ve gotten bigger haul for top pick, but they wanted WR
Had he decided to wait longer, perhaps general manager Ryan Poles could have extracted more for the Bears’ No. 1 overall pick. Poles admitted as much Thursday when he spoke publicly for the first time since agreeing to trade the pick to the Panthers for two first-round picks, two second-rounders and wide receiver D.J. Moore on Friday.
“You think like, ‘This could get even bigger,’ ” he said. “But I also think that if you get a little greedy, it can come back to get you, too.”
Poles didn’t get greedy. It was a hard choice — there’s a reason no one in modern NFL history had ever agreed to trade the first overall pick almost seven weeks before the draft — but he was motivated to add Moore, whom he called a “top-end player,” before the start of free agency.
Had he waited, Poles thought, the Panthers might have had second thoughts about trading their best receiver.
“Sometimes you wait too long and things move on,” he said. “Trades are hard. When you’re a part of them and they pop up, and you’re having those conversations — they’re not comfortable conversations, especially when you’re moving on from a player. So the longer that you’re talking about it and thinking about it, you can start to sway a little bit. So when we hit a position where I was comfortable, we were good with it.
“The noise around it was crazy compensation, but I think at some point when you feel comfortable with what you’re receiving, you pull the trigger.”
The noise started not long after the Bears locked in the league’s worst record in Week 18. Panthers general manager Scott Fitterer reached out to Poles early on, saying he wanted to be part of trade talks if and when the Bears shopped the pick. Once Poles did, there were “twists and turns,” he said — not only with the Panthers, but with other quarterback-hungry teams.
“Teams in and out, conversations where the compensation changed,” he said. “I thought it was almost done one day. And then it went longer, and it pushed to two to three days.
“It took a lot of patience, but I’m glad we got to where we did.”
That doesn’t mean Poles will land a toptier player with the Panthers’ No. 9 overall pick. He said there are “probably six or seven” players in the top tier of this year’s draft, counting all four quarterbacks projected to be chosen in Round 1. That leaves the Bears with only two or three realistic selections from the tier, if they fall that far.
Complicating matters is Georgia defensive tackle Jalen Carter, who struggled through his lone pro-day drill in front of the Bears’ brain trust Wednesday in Athens, Georgia.
Carter was charged with two misdemeanors earlier this month — for reckless driving and racing — related to the Jan. 15 death of former teammate Devin Willock and Georgia staffer Chandler LeCroy in a car accident. On Thursday morning, Carter’s lawyer, Kim T. Stephens, entered two no-contest pleas, and Carter was sentenced to 12 months of probation, a $1,000 fine, 80 hours of community service and a mandatory driving course.
Stephens said in a statement that no further charges can be brought against Carter and that he “never left the scene of the accident” without being told, was not drinking and “did not cause the tragic accident.”
The Bears, who had concerns about Carter before the accident details emerged, will do their homework. They’ll bring Carter to Halas Hall for an official visit — one of the 30 the league allows each team — in the next month.
“We’ll bring him [in], talk to him and get to know him even better,” Poles said. “[At] some point in mid-April, we’ll sit down and see how we want to handle it.”
Poles said the Bears “aren’t really there yet” in terms of making a decision.
“The combine is a collection of information,” he said. “We got some there. We got more at the pro day.”