viewtopic.php?f=2&t=13482 (2019, looking at 2020)
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=14510&hilit=salary+cap (2020, looking at 2021)
As you may not remember, I previously pointed out tough times coming for the Bears in 2020/2021 financially. The Bears dealt with it in 2021 in large part by cutting Fuller, Leno, and Massie 1 year before their contracts expired. As such, they got zilch for them. No trade, no comp picks, nothing. And significant dead money, still.
Their dollar store replacement for Fuller (Trufant) is already gone and they're riding with either an inexperienced R5 shorty (Vildor) or another minimum wage reclamation project (Burns) as a starter (and NB isn't very settled, either).
And their cheap 'As Is, No Returns' LT solution is on IR, with a 40yo (almost) minimum stopgap as the Plan B.
2022's financial outlook is...not really better.
I'm expecting fewer outright cuts, but some meaningful UFAs who won't be back.
Blank spaces under year indicate players that are FAs (or draft picks). I projected them returning and made my best guess at an amount. Most are very low salary anyway, with minimal room for variance.
If year is populated that means they are under contract and their cap number is exact.
I threw in some projected draft picks and pretty close approximations of what they cost.
Position group totals are in the upper right of each group.
It's (obviously) not meant to be an exact blueprint of the future, but something reasonably close that gives you a feel for the situation and what is and isn't on the table.
To Summarize:
- Cuts of significance were Quinn & Trevethan
- Notable FAs not back: Ifedi, Daniels, Dalton, Graham, Hicks
- new external FAs above minimum: NONE
- internal FAs back at more than 1-3M: Robinson and Nichols. That's it.
- 26.5M in dead money. Really. Well over 10% of the cap for players that aren't even here.
- And the end result still doesn't even make it under the cap without more work.
- And the OL is still a wreck unless Jenkins and Borom are both starter quality.
Yes, there's some salary guesswork involved. It's fairly minor, though.
Yes, you can get a little more room by pushing money forward. Not as much as people like to think, though. And doing that is part of the tight situation they are in. That practice makes sense when you're the Saints and are in the mix for a championship nearly every year with an aging great QB. You kick the can down the road and live for the moment. When you're a perennial .500 team with 0 playoff wins, not so much.
Same for heavily backloading Robinson - you can do it, but it's a bad idea.
You can push a little money forward by making Quinn & Trevethan Post June 1, which isn't done here. But they're also pushing Graham money forward (presumably to make a 2021 move), which isn't accounted for here either.
A lot of core players are hitting big raises (mostly in contracts already written, so people aren't really thinking about and expecting it) right about 2022 and they're either literally uncuttable or very painful from a football standpoint to lose - Goldman, Nichols, Roquan, Whitehair, Mack, Jackson. There's not much obvious fat to cut and nearly all there is, I've done. If you want some serious room to maneuver, you're going to have to dig even deeper than launching Ifedi, Daniels, Hicks - you're going to have to do something like say goodbye to a Roquan, Goldman, Mack, Nichols, or ARob.
