jnrjr79 wrote:Oh, yeah, my post was only addressing the salary number. I definitely get some consternation over trading a 2nd and then having to pay that number. Though what was the alternative here? Try to outbid Houston for Danielle Hunter? I think it's likely to work out well, but I take your point that it's risky and often ill-advised to trade away high draft capital for someone you need to sign.
I agree it will work out with Sweat (presuming health and lack of sudden unexpected decline).
As to Sweat's quality, he was 6th in the NFL in sacks last year, 6th in forced fumbles, and 36th in solo tackles among edge rushers. I think he's better than the 25th or 30th EDGE (your post said DL, so many you wanted to include DTs there, but in that event, being 25th in the NFL at a position where there are something like 140 starting DLs isn't so bad).
Maybe he's better than I credit him for, I may be anchored a bit to the performance at the time of the trade where he had averaged about 1 sack every two games in his career prior to the trade. Getting 12.5 last year was a big jump, and to be fair, he had shown that jump at the beginning of that season with Washington.
As to Poles making this a "pattern," I am not so sure. As to the miserable Claypool trade, he was trying to give Justin something of a weapon to evaluate him. As to Sweat, he was trying to put together a win-now roster to be ready for his next QB. The sample size is small enough that I wouldn't draw grand conclusions about his approach. I think he's taking some swings due to the rookie QB contract situation, but that won't always be the situation. Also, he's probably making some more dramatic moves when he's turning an entire roster over than he would be now that he's largely built one. Going forward, hopefully it'll be more draft-focused with an eye toward maintaining the roster than having to build it from the ground up.
Every time you trade picks for players, you are trying to do something. So what he was trying to do doesn't really matter to me that much. The Claypool trade seemed horrendously dumb in the moment to me. The Sweat trade much less so. Overall, I think Poles is pretty mediocre and has backed his way into an amazing situation largely due to luck. I've posted about that at length, but the biggest things going or the Bears are only going for them due to Poles explicit misevaluations and mistakes, not because he purposefully steered the ship here. As my old tennis coach used to say though, I'd rather be lucky than good.
Also, while I do think he's benefited tremendously from luck, he still should be getting better as time goes on. It's his first GM job, and so I'm sure he's learned a lot of lessons over this period of time and hopefully he can apply them going forward.
