Ryan Poles and Kevin Warren on Bears Firing.mp4

Bears GM Ryan Poles and president Kevin Warren discuss the firing of Matt Eberflus and why they think the next hiring can be the right one.

Transcript

00:00Yeah, I've learned a lot over the last few years. I think the most critical thing is

00:10I know from the roster that we have right now exactly what this team needs because of

00:15the core group that we have here. Before that wasn't really the case of understanding who

00:19was going to be here. It was a really tough situation to walk into. So knowing exactly

00:24the core of our team, what traits are going to help get that team to be a championship

00:29caliber. We haven't made that decision right now, so I think we're going to lean on both

00:35of us and our entire organization and everyone in that think tank and make sure that we make

00:42the best decision.

00:44In retrospect, could we have done it better? Absolutely. I'll be the first one to raise

00:48my hand, yes. But during his press conference and even a couple hours later, we had not

00:55reached a decision. But on the flip side of it, something that was important to us is

01:00that once we reached a decision, we wanted to make sure to talk with Matt about that

01:05so he could have the respect to be able to call his family. And I'll say this, one thing

01:10that happened. This is the first time, and it happens around the league a lot, where

01:13a head coach will find out he's terminated and he finds out before he's told from the

01:19organization. And that's something that we promised that we weren't going to do.

01:22Yeah, it's hard to go back and figure out if everything would have been different. But

01:28I want to make sure that we see a process through and not make a split decision. Just

01:34like we talked about from after Thursday, I think there's times where you got to reflect

01:39back, see what maybe some of the issues are. Is there a system problem? And is it repetitive

01:45enough to make a move at that time?