NFL
By: Greg Rector
Shopping Spree
Chicago Bears general manager Ryan Poles and head coach Matt Eberflus are about to have a massive impact on the entire NFL off-season. The Bears just finished the regular season with the league’s worst record and will now have the first overall draft pick. That’s just the icing on the cake for a franchise that will also have an estimated $110 million dollars in salary cap space for the 2023 NFL season. It’s kind of like hitting on the longest exacta possible at the race track. Hallas Hall will be one busy building.
Free Agency
Free agency is where teams address “needs” and there are certainly plenty of them in Chicago. However, they don’t need to worry about the premier position in the game that being quarterback. With that much salary cap space, available Ryan Poles can go on a spending spree like no other franchise. To me, it would seem it will be on offense where the Bears will focus their free-agent attention. Plenty of offensive players would be very interested in joining Justin Fields. With that kind of salary cap space, the Bears could sign a top receiver at least one if not two linemen and let’s not forget the running backs. Many feel David Montgomery won’t return next season. So let’s start the shopping with running backs. The league-leading rusher in 2022 is about to be a free agent. Josh Jacobs welcome to the Windy City and let’s not stop there, a certain Dallas Cowboys running back that had his first 1000-yard rushing season despite not being the RB1 in Dallas is also hitting the market. So Tony Pollard can easily decide that the grass is greener with Fields. Besides Stephen “Cap Boy” Jones isn’t known as the best negotiator. Suddenly the Bears’ backfield becomes a very scary group in a hurry. Need a receiver? How about two Kansas City receivers? Sure playing with Mahomes is great, but Mecole Hardman and JuJu Smith Schuster could find even more money by coming to, you guessed it the Bears. Just those four additions would transform the Bears’ offense never mind additions to the offensive line that is possible as well.
The Draft
Here’s the second part of the exacta, the Bears have a franchise quarterback in the building. Now they could stick with this pick but the temptation to trade this pick will be huge. They can turn the first pick into a ton of draft capital. The upcoming draft in my opinion is loaded defensively. The willingness of quarterback-needy teams to move up in order to draft Bryce Young could have the offers even larger than one would think. We’ve seen the price of the San Francisco 49ers paid to get the third-overall pick and even what it cost the Bears to get Justin fields when they selected him with the 11th pick. When teams believe a possible franchise quarterback could be theirs over- paying is a risk many franchises are willing to make as we have seen before. The Bears were able to address their secondary in the last draft, but could easily stock up on very talented players for their front seven which as we all know has been depleted. Just as the Houston Texans will have five picks in the first three rounds the Bears can load up and quite likely for the 2024 draft as well, see how well it has helped the Philadelphia Eagles. Having a young corp group on defense especially if they draft well would continue to give the Bears flexibility for the next few seasons. We shall what the Bears end up doing but make no mistake Chicago aka “The Second City” is about the first NFL city mentioned this off-season.
As always find me on Twitter @GregsCowboys
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