How Mahomes Evaluation Reportedly Pushed Ryan Poles To Caleb Williams
Once Caleb Williams emerged on the big stage as a star quarterback for USC, people began noticing the similarities he shared with the NFL’s newest final boss, Patrick Mahomes. Everybody keeps making the comparison, seeing the same unique arm talent and improvisational skills. If anybody is qualified to make such an evaluation, it is Ryan Poles. Before becoming Chicago Bears GM, he was the Kansas City Chiefs director of college scouting in 2017 when they selected Mahomes 10th overall in the draft.
It would be so easy to say that pick and its subsequent success is what drove Poles to Williams. However, the evaluation goes much deeper than that. The GM revealed to Josh Schrock of NBC Sports Chicago the important lessons he learned from that pivotal evaluation of Mahomes going into 2017. It wasn’t about his arm strength and accuracy, although both were big parts of it. They needed to know what went on between the ears of the young man. How did he handle situational football? How did he deal with disappointment?
You’ll never learn more about a player than during his darkest times.
“First, the one thing that I think about was just the way we watch tape and evaluate,” Poles said. “How can we set up the film so our eyes are on situations that match what the quarterback is going to see at the next level? Then, it’s the relationship piece in terms of making sure they fit the culture, they also have the resilience, the toughness, the mental toughness to go through those hard times, and that’s really spending a lot of time with the prospects to make sure they have those things.
“And sometimes it’s a projection. That’s why, in some of these situations, I want to see guys go through some hard times and then reflect on that or what they learned from that. I think that’s important. Then, how we set up installing some mock game plans and have that person kind of spit it back to you like later in the day for some recall. I know guys learn differently so it’s not weighted to seriously because we have tools that can kind of help them but the way we are kind of doing the visits and also the way we are watching the tape is similar.”
Ryan Poles needed to know if Williams could handle adversity.
In 2016, Mahomes went 4-8 as a starter. After a 3-1 start to the season, Texas Tech lost six of their final eight games. The QB had one of his worst performances of the season against Iowa State with two interceptions and only 50% of his passes completed. It would’ve been easy to phone in the season finale against Baylor the next week. Instead, Mahomes threw for 586 yards and six touchdowns. Rebounds like that told the Chiefs that he didn’t dwell on bad games for long. That was why Poles was thrilled when Williams had his low point of the 2023 season.
Everybody remembers it. Notre Dame intercepted him three times while dealing USC their first loss of the season. A week later, Caleb Williams played much better, guiding his team to 32 points. Sadly, the defense allowed 34. The quarterback then accounted for eight touchdowns in the next two games, showing the Irish performance had been an anomaly. It was the sort of resilience Ryan Poles probably wanted to see from a young quarterback who hadn’t seen a lot of it for most of his college career.
The lessons he learned from watching Mahomes served him well during that process. Now it appears the Bears have their guy.