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player ready...The challenge for general manager Ryan Pace and coach Matt Nagy is to deliver progress as judged by Chairman George McCaskey with a roster in flux.
The bulk of Pace’s work for the season is complete. There’s only so much roster churning to do once Week 1 arrives. Nagy’s major test continues with, at least from the outset, parallel goals of playing winning football with starting quarterback Andy Dalton while developing first-round pick Justin Fields.
Nagy’s task comes with a roster that will look significantly different in 2022, especially on offense. The starters you see Sunday night at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif., will look different — maybe much different — a year from now. That’s not to remove the focus from the game or the season ahead but to point out this team is in transition.
Nine starters — five on offense and four on defense — including prominent wide receiver Allen Robinson, are slated to be unrestricted free agents after the season. The Bears will have 22 UFAs at the end of the season with three set to be restricted free agents.
Fields is projected to supplant Dalton, playing on a one-year deal, quite possibly before this season ends. Darnell Mooney is the only wide receiver under contract beyond 2021. Offensive tackles Jason Peters and Germain Ifedi and right guard James Daniels will be coming out of contract.
On defense, linemen Akiem Hicks and Bilal Nichols, linebacker Alec Ogletree and strong safety Tashaun Gipson are entering contract years.
Offensive players headed to unrestricted free agency: QB Dalton; WRs Robinson, Marquise Goodwin, Damiere Byrd and Breshad Perriman; RB Damien Williams; OLs Peters, Ifedi, Daniels and Elijah Wilkinson; and TEs Jimmy Graham and Jesse James.
Defensive players headed to unrestricted free agency: DLs Hicks and Nichols; LBs Ogletree, Christian Jones and Joel Iyiegbuniwe; and DBs Gipson, Artie Burns, DeAndre Houston-Carson, Deon Bush and Marqui Christian.
It’s easy to see how the roster will be overhauled in a little more than six months. According to overthecap.com, the Bears have 32 players under contract for 2022, tied for the fifth-lowest in the NFL. They project to have $42.5 million in salary-cap space with the league already announcing the ceiling for next year will be $208.2 million.
Start wondering how that many spots can be filled and you can run through that cap space quickly. The organization has been pressed up against the cap since the end of 2020, encountering a perfect storm with the COVID-19 pandemic rollback of the cap combined with a history of pushing rising cap charges for the highest-paid players on the roster into future years.
The Bears are estimated to have less than $3 million in operating space for the season ahead after restructuring Graham’s contract, meaning he will count more dead money against the cap after he’s gone. The Bears made a series of moves 18 months ago that have challenged their cap, signing Graham and outside linebacker Robert Quinn while bringing back inside linebacker Danny Trevathan.
But there’s reason for optimism. For starters, the new television contracts the league signed will kick into the salary cap beginning in 2023, when a substantial jump is expected. The Bears will have to be prudent come March but can design contracts in a manner in which they can accomplish their goals.
“This was probably the last year it was going to run with a lot of these same guys and really where the Bears are kind of under the gun with the salary cap,” said overthecap.com founder Jason Fitzgerald. “They can do a bit of a reset next year, start to remake the roster and I would imagine get their salary cap in order unless they go down the Atlanta Falcons’ path where they just double and triple down on every single player and you bring everybody back and you screw yourself up.
“The Bears would be in so much worse shape if they didn’t draft a quarterback. (Fields) gives them so many more options going into a retooling mode on the fly. Other teams don’t get that luxury. If they didn’t get Fields to fall to them, they’d be sitting there playing tag with Andy Dalton or Ryan Fitzpatrick every year. This at least gives them a good opportunity to get out of this and maybe move forward versus this sideways trajectory that is going nowhere.”
The thinking in 2018, when Mitch Trubisky was entering his second season, was that the Bears had a good defense that could become great, fueling the trade for edge rusher Khalil Mack. The idea was the window to compete for a championship was just opening. The goal for teams with young quarterbacks on rookie contracts is to take advantage of that cost-controlled asset and use resources elsewhere to fortify the depth chart.
In terms of player development, the Bears also will need to hit on rookie offensive linemen Teven Jenkins, currently recovering from back surgery, and Larry Borom. If they can pair bookend offensive linemen on rookie contracts with an ascending quarterback, it creates a world of possibilities.
Left tackles aren’t the only linemen commanding big paydays. The Minnesota Vikings rewarded right tackle Brian O’Neill with a five-year, $92.5 million extension. If Jenkins and Borom emerge as starters, it would be a huge boost considering the Bears are without a 2022 first-round pick as part of the trade to select Fields.
“If these guys pan out,” Fitzgerald said, “they’ve got yourself a lot of benefits with that type of roster construction over the next three or four years.”
It’s a lot to consider when stepping away from the day-to-day focus Nagy has been preaching since training camp opened. Surely it’s a vision the Bears already have embraced at Halas Hall with teams constantly shaping long-term goals while remaining in the present.
Player development keys the whole operation. The Bears aren’t going to buy their way out of the middle ground coming off consecutive 8-8 seasons. They need Fields to become the franchise quarterback Trubisky never was. They need the rookie offensive tackles to become the latest prized pupils for line coach Juan Castillo.
Fields’ opportunity will come and as Nagy has said repeatedly, everyone will know when it’s time. Fields is competing against himself now more so than Dalton. The quarterback of the future is in place. How they build around him is a story for the offseason.
Nagy must prove the Bears can be competitive with the current roster.
Scouting report
Leonard Floyd, Rams outside linebacker
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Information for this report was obtained from NFL scouts.
Leonard Floyd, 6-5, 240 pounds, is entering his sixth season and second with the Rams after signing a four-year, $64 million contract this offseason following a one-year prove-it deal in 2020. The former first-round pick had a career-high 101/2 sacks last year after totaling 111/2 in the three-season span from 2017-19.
Floyd also had a career-high 50 tackles last season and has now gone three consecutive seasons without missing a game. The Bears believed they were upgrading their pass rush a year ago when they swapped Floyd out for free-agent Robert Quinn, a former two-time Pro Bowl performer for the Rams, but that did not materialize.
The question now is how Floyd will perform with defensive coordinator Brandon Staley, a former assistant under Vic Fangio, departing to become the head coach of the Chargers. Staley has been replaced by Raheem Morris, who doesn’t have a background in the system.
“That is the one thing you have to look for this season because you expect a lot of carry-over,” the scout said. “What they did last year better than probably any team in the NFL was scheme their pass rushers and put Floyd in situations in which he could win more favorable one-on-ones. They also used plenty of games and stunts off the edge to get him easier rush paths to get home to the quarterback.
“It always helps when you’re playing with someone like Aaron Donald because he will be doubled and there will be protection slid to him but there are so many multiple fronts that Los Angeles uses that benefit Floyd and we finally got to see why he had those traits that made him a top-10 pick in terms of his ability to bend on the edge and his short-area speed to close on the quarterback.
“I thought going out to L.A. forced him to develop a deeper toolbox of counter moves, which is something he just never accomplished with the Bears for whatever reason. In my opinion, Donald is even better for Floyd to play alongside than Khalil Mack because A.D. is going to impact the interior protection schemes. A lot of times you’re going to have a man side and a zone side for protection and in most cases, they’re going to put the zone side to Donald to give the guard help. Now you have the man side sliding to Leonard and what that means is he’s going to get a one-on-one. If you can find those matchups for him, and that is what Staley did, you have him in the edge with a favorable matchup. Now, he has to go win against a tackle in a true one-on-one.
“Floyd had a hard time with the Bears. He didn’t play up to expectations and the thing about it is it’s the same defense. I’m sure that helped him get started in L.A. because there wasn’t as much to learn in terms of schematics. I don’t think Raheem Morris will change much. If he’s smart, he won’t. Put it this way: If I’m Sean McVay, I’m hiring someone with the instructions to run the same scheme because I know what it can do.”
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