Bear Digest

Ryan Poles' Odd Explanation for 2025 Major Bears Injury Issue

Addressing the major Chicago Bears 2025 injury issue may depend on a factor out of the team's control if their GM is correct.
Gene Chamberlain|
Jaylon Johnson defends against Matthew Golden in the Bears' wild-card round playoff win over Green Bay.
Jaylon Johnson defends against Matthew Golden in the Bears' wild-card round playoff win over Green Bay. | David Banks-Imagn Images

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Chicago Bears

One by one they lined up in the trainer's room and eventually even wound up on injured reserve.

The Bears had more than their share of soft tissue injuries starting almost from the beginning of last training camp. Actually, these problems started before training camp but the coaching staff had no urgency to report exactly what those offseason injuries were and so they didn't. And as they occurred, the groin injury become the Bears' injury du jour

Kyler Gordon, Jaylon Johnson, Tremaine Edmunds, D'Andre Swift, the list seemed to go on and on, with groin injuries of varying severity. Johnson, Gordon and Edmunds dealt with bad enough groin injuries that they wound up on IR. T.J. Edwards had the other major soft tissue issue, a repeating hamstring injury before he went onto IR with a broken bone in his leg.

The Bears have taken a good look at this medical trend and GM Ryan Poles offered a theory at the combine as to why some of these occurred.

Perhaps they can avoid this again, as the injuries last year were largely centered around the defense and they helped cause some of their problems stopping opponents.

"We look at both from the individual standpoint, how they walked into the injury," Poles said. "We also look at it from our performance team, sports science digging into any of the things we can do to change the health."

A problem of style?

One popular narrative is the defense had a different style of play, emphasizing man-to-man pass coverage over zone, and asking defensive linemen to attack blockers more than they did in their previous scheme when there a pure single-gap attacking group up front.

These different techniques and strategies place different demands on bodies.

It's a theory that seemed to prove correct way back in 2004 when Lovie Smith took over and put in the heavy emphasis on zone and Tampa-2 style. The Bears, in that training camp, went through a massive run of hamstring injuries. They never really had this extent of a problem in subsequent years, though, although ultimately there was no way to substantiate this thought.

Poles offered up his own theory that may or may not make sense to fans. Poles blamed their schedule.

It was a rather strange, inconsistent schedule of dates and times for games.

"I do think the one factor no one's really talked about was last year's unique in the sense that our first bye week was in Week 5, and then we had Friday games, Saturday games, Sunday games—we never really had a Thursday game," Poles said. "If you go back to a couple years ago, there's a really sweet setup that we had was Thursday in the first quarter, Thursday in the second quarter, bye week the last possible week, and that was the most healthy team that we had."

They had a schedule like Poles spoke about in 2023 and in 2024 had a much steadier schedule with almost all Sundays until later in the season.

Ryan Poles' theory

Poles wasn't blaming this all on the schedule. He went back to the new coaching staff thing, although he didn't necessarily tie it to their different system of play.

"I think a little bit of it is schedule, a little bit of it is, you do have a new staff, guys are trying to prove themselves," Poles said. "The output is way higher, which you do try to manage through your sports science.

'But to kind of sum it up, we look through it from a team perspective of what can we do better, but we have to look at all the factors that could have led to it, too, because just resulting, we don't want to create some chaos or redo everything because we might be doing the right thing. It was just the scenario and the environment in terms of the schedule."

At least he's indicating they've given thought to this problem. If schedule is the problem, then there's not much they can do because they're at the mercy of the league and/or TV networks flexing games.

Other theories have blamed Ben Johnson's emphasis on being more physical in practices. The players all seemed to love the day Johnson decided they were going to go 100% full contact at practice in training camp, and some even referred to this as a turning point for the team last year.

Too tough?

If that's the case, it's hard to see how actual physical work could have been the problem, anyway. Teams are all limited to the same number of fully padded practices by the collective bargaining agreement. Johnson didn't have an excessive number of full-contact practices, but did have more contact in training camp than players had been used to in the past. Nevertheless, all of the injuries didn't occur in training camp, and Jaylon Johnson's happened while he was training on his own in the offseason.

Perhaps there is merit, instead, to what Poles said about the regular season schedule.

However, is idea about trying to impress a new staff might have ranked higher on the list of reasons because it only makes sense that they wanted to prove themselves to Johnson, a coach who came in with an electrifying message to players and sought to charge them up.

If this is the case, they should simply run the risk of doing it again in 2026 because no one could have been disappointed by the way it worked overall in 2025, even if a bunch of defensive players wound up on IR.

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Gene Chamberlain
GENE CHAMBERLAIN

Gene Chamberlain has covered the Chicago Bears full time as a beat writer since 1994 and prior to this on a part-time basis for 10 years. He covered the Bears as a beat writer for Suburban Chicago Newspapers, the Daily Southtown, Copley News Service and has been a contributor for the Daily Herald, the Associated Press, Bear Report, CBS Sports.com and The Sporting News. He also has worked a prep sports writer for Tribune Newspapers and Sun-Times newspapers.