The Chicago Bears drafted Trace Armstrong with the 12th overall pick back in 1989, and it looks as though he’s still having a significant impact on the team decades later.
A defensive end during his playing days, Armstrong spent six seasons with the Bears (1989–1994). After retiring, he transitioned into a successful career as a sports agent, representing high-profile coaches and executives throughout the NFL.
A scathing new report from ESPN’s Kalyn Kahler details how several of Armstrong’s clients have ended up with high-level jobs in the Bears organization — whether they’ve deserved it or not.
“I’ve never seen one agent have so much influence on one team and had so little success, but they keep going back and taking his guys,” a coaching agent, who requested anonymity in exchange for candor, told Kahler about Armstrong and the Bears. “And we all kind of shake our heads like, have they not figured this out yet?”
Bears Have Hired Several of Agent Trace Armstrong’s Clients in Recent Years
“The influence of agents on team hiring has become a talking point not just among fans or within the agent community but at the NFL level,” Kahler wrote.
It’s a practice so concerning, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell has gotten involved:
“The appearance of ‘package deals,’ whereby an agent places multiple clients in coaching or front office roles with the same team, has made its way to Goodell’s office and into cautionary literature distributed by the league office to its clubs. Some owners are making agents an outsized part of their hiring process, the league believes, in a way that has the potential to obscure the process of finding the most qualified candidates.”
Kahler’s report details how the Bears specifically have hired Armstrong’s clients in extremely prominent roles.
“Since 2018, agent and ex-Chicago defensive end Trace Armstrong and his agency, Athletes First, have represented two fired Bears head coaches, Matt Nagy and Eberflus; three fired offensive coordinators, Mark Helfrich, Luke Getsy and Shane Waldron; as well as current general manager Ryan Poles,” Kahler noted, before further detailing how Poles, Eberflus and Getsy specifically got to Chicago under rather questionable circumstances.
Poles, Eberflus & Getsy All Connected Through Armstrong
In one of the more damning sections of her very detailed and well-sourced report, Kahler examined how Poles and Eberflus first met.
“As part of their services, many agencies host a summit during the offseason for their coaching and front office clients to meet,” Kahler wrote. “The Bears team website reported that Poles and Eberflus first met on the golf course at an event in 2020 (described as an ‘NFL growth and development summit,’ though the NFL office confirmed the league did not hold such an event in 2020, meaning it was likely an agency summit), and Poles has said his intuition told him Eberflus was the right hire.”
According to Kahler, Eberflus then hired one of his former OCs, Getsy, in a similar fashion.
About a year before Eberflus got the Bears job, he met Getsy, who was Green Bay’s quarterbacks coach and passing game coordinator, also at an Athletes First summit. The two never made any official agreement or pact to work together, but they talked about their football philosophies and kept in touch, according to a source who was present. When Eberflus got his chance to hire his own staff, he chose Getsy, also an Armstrong client. Just like Poles and Eberflus, the two had never worked together. Eberflus did not return calls for this story. Getsy declined to comment, and the Bears declined to make Poles available.
That isn’t all.
“In addition to Poles, Eberflus and Getsy, Armstrong represented the previous Bears head coach, Nagy, who was fired after four seasons, and Nagy’s first offensive coordinator Helfrich, who was fired after two seasons. Waldron, fired as OC midway through his only season in Chicago, is represented by another Athletes First agent, as is Bears special teams coordinator Richard Hightower and quarterbacks coach Kerry Joseph.”
Whew. It’s clear that the Athletes First agency has had its talons sunk into the Bears for quite some time. We’ll see if current team president Kevin Warren — who does not have an agent himself — can do anything to remove them as the Bears continue their search for a new head coach.
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Damning Report Details Sketchy Connection Between Bears & Super Agent