Revisiting the Bears 2025 Draft: 4th Round – Pick 132

We all know it takes more than a single season to accurately assess the success of any draft class. Our own Josh Sunderbruch does a phenomenal job of explaining why this is and looking back at a more reasonable benchmark. But that doesn’t mean we can’t take a moment to look back and see how the early returns are looking and if any selection would have been better spent elsewhere. What better class to assess than one of the more impactful ones we have seen in Chicago for some time? In this series, I will go through each pick in each round and assign what I believe to be the best pick, worst pick and players that could have been selected instead.

Round 4 – Pick 132

Ruben Hyppolite, LB

This is the first pick in the entire draft that I was opposed to in the moment. Not that adding depth at LB in the form of an athletic sideline-to-sideline player like Hyppolite was a bad thing, but my frustrations were two-fold. For one, the consensus at the time was that the former Maryland Terrapin was more of a 6th or 7th round pick. Secondly, at that point, we still needed to add some juice to the RB room, and most of the top RBs had already come off the board by this point.

While Kyle Monangai ended up being one of the best values in the entire draft, more on that later, I was and still am high on Jaydon Blue out of Texas, who was taken 17 spots later. Sure, D’Andre Swift and Monangai looked like one of the top duos in the entire league, but Ryan Poles will need to make some more cap space this off-season and having another rookie RB on the roster would make that easier to do moving forward.

Regarding Ruben, however, he barely saw the field until his first start in week 12 due to injury and then was lost early in that game against the Steelers to an injury himself. The reality is, we saw more in reserve journeymen D’Marco Jackson and Amen Ogbongbemiga on the field than we did from Hyppolite. And with needs at DT, DE and RB, I still believe this selection could have been better suited on someone else. That said, hopefully, he has a big offseason and can showcase what Ryan Poles and Co. saw in him to draft him ahead of consensus.