Bear Digest

Why NFL Ultimately Must Give the Bears Comp Picks (or Lawyer Up)

Analysis: Matt Ryan is president, not the Falcons GM, and plenty of teams have presidents who oversee GMs and are eligible for Rooney Rule comp picks like Chicago should be.
Gene Chamberlain|
Matt Ryan is Falcons president of football, not their GM.
Matt Ryan is Falcons president of football, not their GM. | Mark J. Rebilas-Imagn Images

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Chicago Bears

It's apparent the Bears are going to get some type of compensatory draft picks for Ian Cunningham being hired as the Atlanta Falcons GM if you know how to actually read.

Even if reporters sound like bureaucratic clowns by pointing to legalese and claiming the Rooney Rule says Chicago gets nothing, the Bears need to get those picks because Cunningham really is the guy in charge of what gets done on the football personnel side in Atlanta. If he isn't, why didn't they just let Matt Ryan do the tasks?

It's because Ryan doesn't know how. He's just there to watch Cunningham do his job because their owner is incompetent and he finally realizes it after all these years of failure.

It would be surprising if the Bears don't get the two third-round picks teams normally get for losing a minority executive assistant to the top football decision-making role.

It's just going to be a matter of pressing the issue with the league and using their own logic in the rule against them if necessary, as well as the Falcons' own words and lack of logic.

In the meantime, Bears fans on social media need to quit sounding like ungrateful, spoiled children on Christmas morning.

It's not like someone is taking away a draft pick they already have, it's just a matter of waiting until clarity prevails.

The Rooney Rule's intent was not to hand out draft picks as rewards. This is just a tool. It is simply to promote minority hiring for GM and head coaching positions.

So the Bears, first, have helped do this and now should be happy they've assisted in this just cause. That's the primary objective and contribution to football here.

Also, they helped a hard-working assistant and friend move on to a higher responsibility as the daily decision maker who happens to have a boss now that played football once but doesn't really do much except be president.

And yes, logically they should receive draft picks for all of this because the league's intent of the rule is to reward teams who do what the Bears did, regardless of the Atlanta Falcons' bizarre football structure and no matter what nitpickers and fans from other NFC North teams say.

Atlanta hired Matt Ryan as a sort of overseer of the football decision maker, and to hire the coach. That's because Blank knows and trusts him. He wasn't hired as the GM who is going to make the daily football decisions and run the personnel department like a personnel boss does.

Blank needed this security blanket because he basically is a failure as owner and can't be trusted to make any good football decisions himself. He wouldn't know the first thing about how to hire a GM, so he added a layer and hired someone he knew, who had been his quarterback, to do this. He hired a person with no expertise in operating a personnel department and no knowledge of the responsibilities associated with the job. The GM is Cunningham. Ryan is a president, standing back and lording over things.

This is what Ryan described at a press conference with reporters.

"I'm not doing the scouting," Ryan said. "I'm  not running those meetings. The general manager role is going to be exactly the same as what it's been here before. And that's something we made clear to everybody."

If "everybody" includes the league office, then the Bears will have no problem receiving their comp picks. It is a step up to making the personnel decisions as the general manager from being second guy in the food chain as an assistant GM, no matter how you slice it. 

"I do think it comes down to where can I support," said Ryan, when Blank announced he'd take this new position as a team football president. "Depending on who it is at the head coach position. Or who it is at the general manager position. You know, in what ways can I help? And that's really how I view it."

That doesn't sound like a guy running the show. He's just providing "support."

The role Ryan has is distant overseer, not the guy running things. It's Cunningham who will be running things. If Ryan doesn't like the way Cunningham is running things, then he is the one who will fire Cunningham because Blank sure doesn't want to put his hands in the mess again.

Those who say Ryan is the head football guy because of his title are simply wrong. He's football department overseer and supporter, not the guy running the show.

Detroit had Ron Wood as president and his stated role by the organization was to oversee business AND football operations. The Rams still got extra third-round picks in 2021 and 2022 when Brad Holmes left L.A. to become Lions GM.

That's what this is in Atlanta.

The Rooney Rule wording just didn't account for disfunctional type organizational charts like Arthur Blank put in place in Atlanta, one that hired a popular former player so he had an executive position called "president" with the GM reporting to him. That's all Ryan is.

If a minority coordinator leaves a team and becomes a head coach, the league would not block the third-round picks from being awarded if the organizational structure has someone responsible for hiring or firing head coaches, like, say, a GM.

That's what this situation is, except it's someone who hires and fires the general manager.

If the Rooney Rule was not intended to give the Bears compensatory picks for losing their primary football executive's assistant to another team where he will have all the duties of the normal primary football executive but will have a former player who determine if he's doing a good job as GM, then they could not give those picks to any franchise that has both a team president and a general manager.

It's that simple.

The rule says the team losing this executive to a promotion gets a third-round pick in each of the next two drafts.

There is no reason to think the league would see otherwise, especially if quietly, and behind the scenes, Bears owner George McCaskey calls the commissioner and reminds him this is the way it is. There can be no doubt that Roger Goodell would agree, based on how he has championed the causes of minority hirings through the Rooney Rule.

The league would look too silly if they didn't reward the Bears those picks, but in this case it's distasteful to raise a stink about something like this and also more respectful to the powers that be to let George do it his own back-channel, quiet way.

The league already has enough egg on its face over Bill Belichick's omission from the Hall of Fame for 2026 even if the league isn’t responsible for it.  They don't need another embarrassment caused by this technicality, which results from an owner's decision to change his franchise's hierarchy in some weird way.

Whining and bleating like social media sheep, as Bears fans have done, fails to help anyone's cause. It only makes Bears fans sound like the spoiled kids crying after they opened their Christmas presents to discover grandma incorrectly wrapped gifts and gave Johnny Jill's present and vice versa.

They'll fix it. Now shut up. You sound like Packers fans.

Save the complaining for if they announce compensatory picks later this offseason and there isn't one for the Bears in Round 3.

That's when to complain, because if it gets to that point then the Bears' backchannel approach will have failed, and there will be an obvious flaw in the Rooney Rule even beyond the other failures already apparent with it.

If the Falcons are saying the GM is the GM and running the football show, and the Bears don't get their comp picks after McCaskey has a chance to correct the NFL, then there's no need to cry and whine.

Instead, it will be time for the Bears to lawyer up because they really were wronged.

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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.