Read Part I here.
The worst football moments of Drake Maye’s collegiate football life were plastered on the screen for all to breathe in. This was no accident. Multiple people inside this 2024 draft meeting say they knew exactly what Ryan Poles was up to. “He’s not sneaky,” recalls one scout, “and he thinks he is.” The Chicago Bears general manager, it appeared, was implanting the worst possible first impression he could inside the minds of his personnel men.
It wasn’t pretty. Under constant duress, he completed less than half of his passes vs. Clemson. He ran for his life vs. Miami.
Clicker in hand, at the center of the room, Poles repeatedly hit rewind on errant passes and it didn’t take long for those echoes of “Geez!” to turn into outright laughter. Poles and his confidants were not interested in sparking a substantive conversation about the North Carolina quarterback. This draft meeting resembled a bully in the high school cafeteria seeking toadies — any veneer of scouting objectivity was shed.
Maye escaped free runners, threw at awkward angles, sailed incompletions. At times, the spiral of his ball was off. Other times, the receiver broke in and the ball was thrown out. All funky plays were magnified and mocked to make it appear as if this is exactly who he’d become as a pro quarterback.
Poles chimed in.
“This tape makes my chest tight,” one source recalls the GM saying.
All but a select few scouts broke out in laughter.
One brave soul did speak up. Chris White, the team’s assistant director of pro scouting that spring, called out Poles. “We’re dragging this kid through the mud,” he said. North Carolina’s receiving corps was hurting that final ’23 season. White asked his boss to show another game out of fairness. So, he did. Maye started gunning NFL-level throws downfield and White spoke up again. “I like that there,” he said. Two narratives were now clashing. Poles didn’t hit rewind on these plays. Inside the room, one scout recalls the mood turning tense.
After negative plays, Poles made a wry comment: “Dirt ball there” or “You like that, too?”
Laughter picked back up. The team’s area scout, Ryan Cavanaugh, flatly stated that he didn’t believe Maye was a very good player and Poles jumped in to reset the temperature of the room. “I agree,” he said.
Eventually, the GM set the clicker down. “This guy,” he repeated, “makes my chest tight watching this.”
Case closed. Maye was stacked out of the first round.
“They made fun of him,” says one Bears scout in the room. “They laughed. The GM laughed Drake Maye off the screen, and cut the tape off.”
Jayden Daniels wasn’t stacked much higher. The Heisman Trophy winner who filleted defenses with horsepower the sport hadn’t seen since Lamar Jackson was never a serious contender for the No. 1 pick. Not once, sources in the room say, did Poles open up the floor to ask a simple question: Who’s a better quarterback: Caleb Williams or Jayden Daniels? “Jayden Daniels was clearly — clearly — a better quarterback,” says one scout. “If he didn’t want to go with Drake Maye, Jayden Daniels was clearly a better quarterback to anyone with an eye.”
And when it was time to discuss Williams, the tenor in the room changed drastically. His film was massaged in a manner to present the USC quarterback at his absolute best. Nobody dared to chuckle. The Bears didn’t dissect his wretched performance against Notre Dame on tape, only discussing that three-interception, 48-20 defeat through rose-colored glasses. No magnifying glass was panned over this quarterback’s flaws.
To those seeking a vibrant debate, these draft meetings were a farce.
“The quarterback process? I would not even call it a process,” says one scout in the room. “The Caleb Williams draft pick was the most embarrassing lack of a process — a fair, impartial process to scouting — that I’ve ever seen in my life. There wasn’t any type of actual comparison on a fair slate to which quarterback is actually better.
“They had it all lined up. It was a rigged trial.”
Reality is, the decision was likely made long before the decision was even discussed.
