Why don’t we go through the major arguments shall we?
COACHING: Eberlose was hired 2 days after Poles became GM. That speaks to a flawed hiring process that didn’t let Poles pick his guy. My guess is George came in and said you can hire any one of these 3 guys. Poles should be able to pick his guy to run the team whether it’s Ben Johnson or Ejiro Evero or Ken Dorsey or whoever.
FREE AGENCY/CONTRACTS: Obviously this is a salient topic because JJ asked for a trade, but honestly, I don’t think it’s the wrong decision if JJ was asking for way too much. Roquan was never coming back. You can’t trash the GM and expect to stay. The Kmet extension was smart and made a ton of sense. Tremaine and TJ have performed decently for what we paid them and Andrew Billings has been sneaky good.
TRADES: Much too early to judge the most recent deal, but he’s hit both ends of the spectrum. The trade from the #1 pick was a hit, obviously the Claypool trade was a massive L. But in the moment, the Claypool trade made a bunch of sense, and I’m guessing a lot of people on this sub would’ve killed Poles for not getting any help for JF1.
DRAFT CLASSES: In Poles first class, he took among others Kyler Gordon(who’s developing nicely), Jaquan Brisker(who’s pretty good), Braxton Jones(who could be a Charles Leno analogue), and Elijah Hicks(who’s been a good depth piece akin to DHC)
This past class could be even better. Darnell Wright has looked really good, Gervon Dexter has been highly rated, Roschon Johnson runs like he’s angry at the grass, and Stevenson, Pickens, Scott, and Terrell Smith have shown flashes.
In conclusion, Poles shouldn’t be fired; he should be given more time. Two years isn’t enough to fix this dumpster fire. But he’s helped build a new foundation.
I feel like we are vastly overrating his first class.
Kyler Gordon looks ok but plenty of high 2nd rd cbs look way better on day 1. Brisker has not looked good this year imo.
On the last year, Wright does look like a monster but nobody else is really jumping off the page as a rookie.
This post makes a ton of sense if you just pretend like all the guys you said are good actually are
The problem is, they’re not
Kmet extension wasn’t smart. He can’t get open downfield and his yac is horrid. He’s a short pass specialist that’s mid as a blocker. Doesn’t offer any significant advantages and costs top 10 money for his position.
Tremaine edmunds is worth what now. He was paid insane money and has a 53 pff after half a season.
Now they’ll be paying 25 aav for a non top 10 edge that they moved a high day 2 pick for.
Poles ain’t it
Poles clearly prides himself in not overspending for players. He’s now put himself in a position where he will need to put his ego aside and hand out a bad contract or two.
I feel like I’m the only one that isn’t totally hating Poles yet. The Claypool trade was bad for sure, and spending a lot of money at the LB position doesn’t move the needle a ton, but we still have lots of cap space so fine. Other than that I don’t think he’s had any truly terrible misses honestly.
Poles traded away our star LB, however he didn’t really want to re-sign with us anyways, so fine. Then he goes and makes a very good trade to give Fields some weapons and a tackle with their top pick to see if Fields is the guy. Turns out he’s not. Sucks, but ok at least Poles gave him a chance. So then what, he trades for a very solid DL to help take the load off our promising young secondary that he drafted. We’ll see how that pans out, but there’s not a star DL in this draft so he traded for proven talent, albeit for a 2nd round pick. But we still have two picks in the 1st so as of right now I like it. He also threw some flyers at Dexter and Pickens to try to boost our DL. We could’ve overpaid for someone last offseason but I’m glad Poles is staying disciplined.
Assuming we keep JJ then his moves are making more sense to me as it keeps going. I just feel like people are picking apart his recent moves because they’re looking at them individually and in a short-term view (e.g, “we suck why are we buyers at the deadline when we could use that lock for the future!?!”) rather than stepping back and looking at the bigger picture of what he’s done.