Bears Aquire OL Ryan Bates from Buffalo

Poles seems to me to be a GM who likes value signings in FA.  I actually like that.  Doesn't mean all will work out but it does mean you don't get saddled with burdensome contracts when they don't.  

Yes, this is just my opinion but I feel like its rare that big-money FAs pan out as well as you would hope.  I'm not saying NEVER, just saying keep your emotions in check.  Every fan wants their team to sign the 2 or 3 biggest names in every FA and that rarely works out well.

CHGO yesterday put out a list of 5 potential Bears FA signings and only 1 was an "A-list player" (Wilkins).  And I think Poles sees it similarly.  

Smith played pretty well last year.  Opponents only had a 58% completion rate against him — better than Stevenson (65%).  NFL average is 64%. Jaylon Johnson is 56%.

Bit of a limited sample size there. He saw a whopping 43 targets on the 200 some odd pass snaps he had. Stevenson saw nearly 3 times that(110 targets) in the well over 500 pass snaps he had. Smith played ok...if you watched the actual film instead of just his stats you'd know he had some serious issues in coverage last year too.