NFL 2024 Combine Takeaways: Bears’ Plan for Quarterback, and Caleb Williams, Will Materialize Soon

Coming into the combine, Chicago hoped to finalize its evaluation of the USC star before free agency began. Even still, the signs point toward a decision in the near future.

Back from Indianapolis and, man, do we have a lot to get to. Your post-combine Takeaways …

I believe the Chicago Bears’ plan at quarterback will crystallize soon, and the winds of change are blowing. There’s some tea-leaf reading we can do here. Until this weekend, the Bears had planned to bring USC Trojans QB Caleb Williams to Chicago for his top 30 visit Tuesday, fresh off the combine. That is extraordinarily early—most teams don’t even start with 30 visits until the end of March or beginning of April when pro days are wrapping up.

Williams made a strong impression at the combine despite limited participation :: Kirby Lee/USA TODAY Sports

The idea was pretty simple. Chicago wanted to check some final boxes before finalizing its plan at quarterback before free agency starts next week. In the end, Williams and the team decided to move things around: Rather than shuttling the quarterback to and from California again, in the midst of preparations for his March 20 pro day, the Bears will host Williams in Chicago shortly after that instead.

But the idea alone tells you plenty about where the team is.

In an ideal world, the Bears would be able to go through a complete process in assessing this year’s quarterback class before deciding what to do with Justin Fields. Alas, the world Chicago is living in now isn’t such an ideal one. Simply put, it’s not practical for Chicago to wait until mid-April, when the spots available for veteran quarterbacks across the league have filled up, to trade Fields.

It wouldn’t allow for the Bears to maximize Fields’s value. It also wouldn’t be doing right by Fields, which is what Chicago GM Ryan Poles told the media he wants to do.

And so living in this unideal world, with a tighter timeline as a result, the Bears have been aggressive in getting answers on Williams, who they see as a unique talent who has separated himself from the rest of the quarterbacks. It started when the season ended, with team brass having an honest conversation with Fields about the unique position they were in—carrying the first pick after finishing the season strong, thanks to last year’s deal that sent the 2023 first pick off to the Carolina Panthers.

After that …

• In dispatching his scouts to all-star games, Poles directed evaluators to ask about the 2022 Heisman winner when they interviewed Oklahoma Sooners or USC players, or others who crossed paths with Williams. The returns there were good. Sometimes, you can get awkward pauses, if players are lukewarm on teammates they’re asked about. It was the opposite in this case. The mention of Williams’s name brought about a lot of smiles.

• In interviewing then USC assistant Kliff Kingsbury for their offensive coordinator job in Los Angeles in January, the Bears did a ton of fact-finding. Kingsbury described a player beloved by his coaches and teammates, and also gave the Bears very real insight into Williams’s father, and how involved he was. The quarterback’s dad, Kingsbury told them, was sharp, and someone that Williams leaned on a lot business-wise. But the father left the football part to his kid; Kingsbury explained to Chicago he saw the dad maybe once last year at USC’s practice facility.

• And there was, of course, evaluating film. Maybe the most interesting part (to me, at least) is how Poles’s background with the Kansas City Chiefs, working under GMs John Dorsey and Brett Veach, changed the way he, and so many other scouts, looked at the quarterback position. In identifying, drafting, and then watching the career of Patrick Mahomes, all those people learned to put a greater premium on creativity and playmaking at the position.

That left the Bears to come to Indianapolis for the combine to move into the final stages of firming up their quarterback plan.

On Wednesday at 10:40 p.m. (the second-to-last window of the night), Chicago had its formal interview with Williams in the suites of Lucas Oil Stadium. Poles was joined by the five people who are the point men in the Williams evaluation process: coach Matt Eberflus, offensive coordinator Shane Waldron, pass-game coordinator Thomas Brown, assistant GM Ian Cunningham and team president Kevin Warren.

What they saw from Williams in that setting was an easy confidence, and a player who was not concerned much with what other people thought of him. That last part is key, because the Bears have tried to drill down on making sure the person they pick first can handle the pressure and spotlight of the Chicago market.

Williams checked that box. The next one came Friday night, when Bears brass got a chance to sit down and meet with the quarterback’s team, as a precursor to the 30 visit.

Williams is owning the NFL draft process by doing it on his own terms :: Trevor Ruszkowski/USA TODAY Sports

When that visit does happen, Williams will undergo a physical (he declined to take part in medical testing in Indianapolis, which we’ll have more on in a bit) and have a litany of meetings. There, Chicago will make sure the fit is there, and that the chemistry between coaches and front office folks and Williams is apparent. And while checking those boxes won’t be akin to turning the card in on April 25, it will get the Bears one step closer to that.

For now, though, while Poles has positioned the Bears to trade Fields in the coming days, he’s also open to waiting a bit if it takes time for the QB market, with Kirk Cousins and Baker Mayfield as headliners, to develop. The key is the team has flexibility; Chicago will be realistic in finding the right return for the 11th pick in the 2021 draft. It’s probably not getting a first-rounder, and it hasn’t been working off any assumption that it will be. Instead, they Bears have looked at historical data points as models.

One was the San Francisco 49ers’ trade of Alex Smith to the Chiefs, which happened when Poles was a young scout in Kansas City. The trade was for a high second-round pick in 2013 (No. 34), and a conditional pick in ’14 (a third-rounder that became a second after Kansas City hit eight wins in ’13). Smith was traded again in ’18, from Kansas City to the Washington Commanders, for a third-round pick and veteran corner Kendall Fuller. That cleared the way for Mahomes to take over.

A second model was the New York Jets’ trade of Sam Darnold to the Panthers in 2021, with New York landing a sixth-round pick in ’21, and second- and fourth-rounders in ’22 to get Darnold. That, of course, cleared the decks for the Jets to take Zach Wilson at No. 2.

Whether the Bears can hit these comps remains to be seen. Fields’s contract certainly complicates the matter. A trading team would get him for $2.3 million this year, but would have to make a decision in May on his $25.7 million option for 2025, knowing declining it and getting a good year from Fields would make him more expensive to keep in a year. And as for potential teams, the Atlanta Falcons and Pittsburgh Steelers have at least explored it.

But either way, the main thing here isn’t what the return—based on what’s been ballparked to me over the past couple of months, a package of a Day 2 pick and a Day 3 pick would make sense—winds up being. It’s the decision that’s coming down the pike for the Bears.

A decision that, yes, could be made pretty soon.

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This year’s combine showed that the football player of tomorrow is here today. Williams made the decision to eschew medical testing. Ohio State Buckeyes star Marvin Harrison Jr., as mapped out for you here last week, not only limited his participation to interviews with teams and medical testing, but he also won’t train for any of the track-and-field stuff you saw this weekend at all. LSU Tigers’ Jayden Daniels and Malik Nabers declined to be weighed and measured.

Not unrelated: This year’s true juniors and redshirt sophomores, now eligible for the draft for the first time, are the first high school class to come into the NFL having played their entire college careers with NIL money available to them.

That matters, because a lot of these players have had agents since they were 18 or 19; they’ve been making decisions for years now; and they aren’t just going to accept the NFL’s norms. Logically, for that group, doing something because it’s always been done a certain way doesn’t make much sense. They already lived life as college football players in a way that no one ever has before.

It allows Williams to see that it makes no sense to give teams that’ll never have a shot at drafting him information on any new medical conditions doctors find while poking and prodding him. It allows for Harrison’s calculus to show that preparing for his rookie year is smarter than spending three months and six figures on training that’ll only force him to re-train himself for football in the spring. It gives Daniels and Nabers the leeway to not give scouts two shots at sizing them up, with training closer to completion at pro day.

Now, all these players are able to do this because they’re locks to go in the first half of the first round. Very few players can look at the draft order and say that only a certain number of teams need their medical info. All but a select few can help themselves by competing in the physical testing—and lose out with teams by not competing. For players outside the elite group, the measurements are another tool to show teams that they’ve made progress.

The great majority are incentivized by the fact that teams having their information could help down the line, should they be cut, traded or become available in free agency.

This is hardly going to crater the combine. It’s still important for a lot of players that were in Indianapolis this week. But if you’re simply expecting the biggest stars in college football to go through all the paces for an NFL that’s increasingly trying to make it a more and more of a for-profit event? The truth is, players have been inching away from that for years. This year’s class was simply the first to not tip-toe around how they’ve come to view combine.

Which is good for the players, not a big problem for the teams, and only really a major issue for those trying to turn the combine into something it was never supposed to be.

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The receiver group really delivered. We can actually start with Harrison, who met with nine teams—and lived up to his reputation as a cerebral, sharp, affable kid. I had an exec from one team that met with him say that their meeting with the Ohio State star was as “great as any we’ve had.” Thus, the evaluation here won’t be difficult.

“Yeah, he’s super easy,” says an AFC college scouting director.

Harrison met with nine teams total and went through medicals while declining to take part in on-field drills or physical testing. He actually did ask a couple teams if there’s anything they’d need to see at his pro day in Columbus, Ohio, later this month. One I talked to laughed at the notion.

So right now, I’d pencil him in as the fourth pick to the Arizona Cardinals. One former colleague of Monti Ossenfort told me that Harrison is a wheelhouse sort of prospect for the Cardinals GM, the way Harrison’s ex-teammate Paris Johnson Jr. was last year. Both are very clean character-wise, and a height-weight-speed dynamo. Maybe Harrison goes before the Cardinals pick. I have a hard time seeing him get past them.

From there, two other players have a very legit shot of going in the top 10.

The first is Washington Huskies’ Rome Odunze, who absolutely knocked ’em dead in Indy. Coming in at a shade under 6’ 3” and weighing 212 pounds, the Huskies’ contested-catch superstar ran a 4.45 in the 40-yard dash, which is huge for a prospect battling concerns over his ability to separate, and registered a 39-inch vertical leap. With the Los Angeles Chargers, New York Giants and Tennessee Titans picking right after Arizona, he’s a good bet to go inside the top seven picks.

The second is  Nabers, the one player in this group who didn’t help himself this week. He skipped the on-field work, which isn’t a big deal. He also chose not to measure or weigh in, which perplexed a lot of teams. But he’s good enough that he’ll be given plenty of rope to make up for that at his pro day.

Then, there’s the next tier of guys. Nabers’s teammate, Brian Thomas Jr., was the second-fastest receiver at the combine, smoking a 4.33 in the 40-yard dash at 6’ 3” and 209 pounds, while jumping 38.5 inches. After that, you get the Texas Longhorns’ burners: Xavier Worthy broke the combine record in the 40 with a 4.21, and his 6’ 2”, 205-pound teammate, Adonai Mitchell, ran a 4.34 in the 40, and jumped 39.5 inches. All three are very much in the first-round conversation.

Further down the line you have players like the Georgia Bulldogs’ Ladd McConkey and the Michigan Wolverines’ Roman Wilson, rounding out another great year at a position that seems like it’s now always good.

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Michael Penix Jr. was probably the winner among the quarterbacks. Or at least that’s what I kept getting back from the evaluators that were inside Lucas Oil Stadium on Saturday.

Penix threw well at the combine :: Kirby Lee/USA TODAY Sports

Remember, the presumed top three—Williams, Daniels and the North Carolina Tar Heels’ Drake Maye—declined to throw at the combine. That opened the door for the next tier of quarterbacks to gain ground. Whether they did or not is a matter of opinion. But after poking around a little, I can give you my take on where those five stand.

1. The throwing session was perfect for Penix, and the Washington star didn’t disappoint. “Penix stood out from the group,” texted an NFC exec. “Easy, natural thrower. Smooth and the ball comes off his hand explosively, but it’s catchable. And he was accurate in that setting.” So now it’s on to digging through the medicals, which will be a swing factor for a lot of teams.
2. A couple misfires went viral on social media, but overall, Michigan’s J.J. McCarthy’s momentum coming into Indianapolis carried through. “I thought he was next [after Penix],” said another NFC exec. “He missed a couple to his left. But he was pretty good, confident, delivered it well. The fact that he’s almost 220 helps, too.” The workout also confirmed McCarthy has plenty of arm strength. “It’s good,” said the exec. “Not really good or great.”
3. Bo Nix’s workout did confirm some fears. Coming from an offense heavy on short, quick throws and screens, the Oregon Ducks star struggled a bit down the field, which matched how he’d spun it at the Senior Bowl. Of course, there’s five years of tape out there on Nix, so it’s not like many surprises were expected.
4. South Carolina Gamecocks QB Spencer Rattler was a bit of a disappointment. He probably had the best week of any of the Senior Bowl quarterbacks in Mobile, and, given his arm talent, the combine should be a setting where he’d shine. He was just O.K. He did show a stronger arm than Nix’s, but was also erratic from an accuracy standpoint.
5. No one really stepped forward beyond those four, but Tennessee Volunteers QB Joe Milton did show off his bazooka of an arm.

And so now it’s on to the pro days for all these QBs (and the three who didn’t throw at Lucas Oil) as we inch closer to April and the draft.

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On the veteran front, all eyes are on Cousins. That much was clear after my week in Indianapolis. And it’s because, even at 35 and coming off a torn Achilles, Cousins is seen as the easiest way for a team to quickly fill a quarterback hole, and keep it plugged for the next few years.

I’ll start by saying it’s my belief that the Minnesota Vikings want to keep Cousins—and by that, I mean in particular the Minnesota coaching staff.

Naturally, the next question from there would be why, then, a new deal isn’t done already. And the negotiation of last offseason really tells the tale. In exploring an extension, the Vikings didn’t want to guarantee money past 2024. As Cousins saw it, he would have just been getting one extra year assured, while potentially signing the rest of his career away to the Vikings in the non-guaranteed years he’d be agreeing to.

The divide on that illustrates where the negotiation has been. Yes, Minnesota wants to keep Cousins, but it’s been made pretty clear that it won’t be on a fully guaranteed deal for more than a couple of years. To each side’s credit, that hasn’t drawn any sort of wedge between the quarterback and his team, so it’s not like there is some irreconcilable issue here if everyone can make the finances work.

Obviously, the Vikings and Cousins’s camp met at the combine in Indianapolis, so the lines of communication are open, though no price tag has been set by anyone yet.

If Cousins goes elsewhere? The Falcons have been the team connected to him the most in league circles, with the offensive coaches putting in a system (Zac Robinson worked with Kevin O’Connell at the Rams) that he’s very familiar. The Denver Broncos and New England Patriots are two others with offensive play-callers who, like O’Connell, want their quarterback to handle a lot at the line of scrimmage.

Regardless of who ends up bidding, history tells us that the structure of the contract will be important to Cousins, maybe more so than just the money. He’s going to want the deal he signs to reflect the commitment a team is making to him as a starter. It’s why he turned down more to go for the fully guaranteed deal in Minnesota in 2018, along with the Vikings’ position as a contender. It could well chart the course in ’24.

Cousins is a veteran quarterback who should have options this offseason :: Geoff Burke/USA TODAY Sports

Now, of course, Cousins is not the only potential starter out there. Mayfield, who’s been tied to the Patriots (he’s got connections to scouting chief Eliot Wolf and OC Alex Van Pelt), could make it to the market, too. Fields, Ryan Tannehill and Russell Wilson will also be available.

But Cousins is the best one, as most see it. And so where he signs could wind up affecting the rest of the veteran picture at the position.

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The new kickoff proposal is so new that I feel like we’d have to see it implemented before having strong opinions on it. It came after two years of work by New Orleans Saints special teams coordinator Darren Rizzi and Dallas Cowboys special teams coordinator John Fassel, and it was helped along by the XFL kickoff of a year ago. The proposal was presented to commissioner Roger Goodell and the league’s competition committee in Indianapolis by Rizzi, Fassel and Bears STC Richard Hightower eight days ago. It’ll be discussed at the league meeting later in March.

The overriding concept here is twofold. One, the coaches who worked on this wanted to preserve the kickoff. Two, they wanted to eliminate the space and speed that have made the play so dangerous over the years.

As @TomPelissero said, the NFL is working on a proposal that INCLUDES teams having to declare onside kicks. But it's part of a much larger concept that'll have teams kicking off from the opponent's 40-yard line, with an aim on increasing returns, taking space/speed out.

(cont.)

— Albert Breer (@AlbertBreer) March 3, 2024

So Rizzi and Fassel tweaked the proposal over and over until they finally got to what they presented to the league. They then discussed it among a group of nearly 60 special teams coaches from across the league on Saturday. There may be some more adjustments still coming, but we can take you through the rough draft of the proposal:

• The kickoff team would follow the current alignment rules, with the 10 cover players, excluding only the kicker, required to have a foot on the opponent’s 40-yard line.

• The bulk of the return team would be in a so-called “setup zone”, between the 30- and 35-yard line. At least nine players would have to be in that area, and six of them would have to have a foot on the 35.

• Teams would then put one or two returners in the “landing zone,” which would be between the 20-yard and the goal line.

• No one would be allowed to move other than the kicker and returners until the ball was fielded by a man on the return team.

• No fair catches.

• To incentivize creating returns, if the ball landed in the end zone, or went through the end zone, on the fly, a touchback would take the ball out to the 35-yard line.

• If the ball, on the other hand, bounced in the landing zone, and was then downed in the end zone, a touchback would only take the ball to the 20-yard line.

• If the ball didn’t get past the 20-yard line on the fly, it’d be treated as an out-of-bounds kick, and the offense would take possession on the 40.

I understand digesting, and visualizing, how this would work isn’t easy. But the more I think of it, the more I like it. As intended, it would prevent the sorts of collisions you get when guys have a 25-yard head start to run their bodies into someone. And while I don’t know if it’d flip the 80-to-20 touchback-return ratio you see now, as special teams coaches are hopeful it will, it certainly would bring returners back to a more prominent place within the game.

A lot about this makes sense. It would also take some getting used to, and probably a lot of experimentation, which makes me wonder if we see a trial run in the preseason next year.

Either way, we should know soon.

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While we’re on the rules, I love the idea the Cleveland Browns have of moving the trade deadline back. Their logic is very sound—when the league went to 17 games, an adjustment should have happened, but didn’t—so let’s dig into that.

Here are some numbers that illustrate where Cleveland is coming from in trying to get the system changed.

• First of all, in comparison with other sports, the timeline of the NFL’s deadline is hyper-conservative. Over the past three years, the NHL’s been through 77.6% of its seasons at its deadline, the NBA at 65.2% and MLB at 64.2%. The NFL is at 45.0%. And the NFL’s rules are much more stringent in a sport that demands more injury replacements over the course of a season than in any other sport.

• The Browns have also suggested the idea of syncing things up with the end of bye weeks, so every team is at the same point in their season when the deadline comes—and every player has had the same period of evaluation and exposure to injuries. As it is, putting the deadline after Week 8, that’s not anywhere near the case.

• As for concerns about teams dumping salaries if the deadline is later, since more will be out of the chase? Well, over the past three years, the earliest a team has been ousted from playoff contention is Week 11. And over the past three years, an average of more than 27 teams per season have been within two games of the playoff picture after Week 10, with at least 28 teams remaining in the playoff chase in each of those years through Week 14.

So with all of that in mind, the Browns have three proposals: to push the deadline back a week (post-Week 9), two weeks (post-Week 10) or three weeks (post-Week 11). I would actually be for the post-Week 11 one, because it would mean we’d get more action, plus give more teams more chances to address injury problems that pop up in the natural course of an NFL season.

I’d expect the trade deadline, along with the kickoff, to be a topic of conversation in Orlando at the end of the month.

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The 49ers had their cake and ate it too with their defensive coordinator hire. San Francisco coach Kyle Shanahan, like Bill Belichick once did, always prefers to look inside his own operation to address the natural staff attrition of a perennial contender. In this case, he did just that and brought in an experienced backstop for that hire.

Sorensen joined the 49ers after the 2021 season :: Kyle Terada/USA TODAY Sports

On the front end of this will be new coordinator Nick Sorensen, the former NFL safety promoted from defensive pass-game specialist/nickels coach. Shanahan, I’m told, liked Sorenson so much in his first year on the staff, 2022, that he nearly promoted him to replace DeMeco Ryans last January. Shanahan stopped just short then, believing Sorensen needed just a little more time in the building. The head coach went through with it this time around, making a hire that has some parallels to that of Robert Saleh in ’17—in that Saleh was also a bit of an unknown.

On the back end, the Niners are bringing in former Chargers coach Brandon Staley, who, per sources, has indeed been hired with the title of assistant head coach. He’ll add a wealth of defensive play-calling experience and knowhow from a system that Shanahan has long thought so highly of. (It’s Vic Fangio’s scheme, and Shanahan tried to hire Fangio in 2017.)

Put it together and you have two hires who are close in age and should mesh easily.

San Francisco also has a team very much in a win-now spot. So there’ll be a lot of pressure on both Staley and Sorensen to make it happen with a defense loaded with physical ability.

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I’ll miss Chris Mortensen. I was thinking a few weeks ago about reaching out to Mort, and thanking him for all he’s done for me and so many others. It slipped my mind—and, man, do I wish I could turn back the clock now, and make that phone call to tell him how I felt.

Mortensen died Sunday at the age of 72.

You can start with who he was as a professional: one of the original NFL insiders, a guy who was as sourced up as anyone in football journalism. No one knew more people—or engendered more loyalty and respect from those people—than Mort, which is a huge part of how he grew into a legend in our little corner of the pro football world.

But as good as he was in that arena, he was even more of a force outside of it, and that was apparent in all the tributes on social media Sunday. I mentioned how often he’d drop you a note to say what a good job he thought you were doing. I posted one from the lockout in 2011, when I was just trying to get by day-to-day.

Tough to put into words how much Chris Mortensen meant to our business—He accomplished so much. And along the way he did a lot for others. I'll never forget the random notes he'd send me while I was covering the lockout, before I knew him very well, to encourage me.

RIP Mort. pic.twitter.com/lLJHAvOW9s

— Albert Breer (@AlbertBreer) March 3, 2024

Fact is, when I got that, I actually really did need to hear that. Mort seemed to have this incredible knack for reaching out in those moments, when you could really use the encouragement.

He set a great example and a high bar for all of us. He will be missed.

I’m sending out my prayers to his wife, Micki, and son, Alex.

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After a week at the combine, we’ve got a lot to touch on in the quick-hitters. Let’s roll …

• I’d guess—and this is just a guess—the Chiefs get something done with Chris Jones within a week. Jones wants to stay there. Kansas City wants him around. There’s been progress. I have to think there’s a common ground to be found on this one.

• That will likely mean star corner L’Jarius Sneed gets traded. I’d bet he fetches a second-round pick for the Chiefs and gets himself a deal worth more than $20 million per year.

• It sounds like the Patriots are exploring all their options at quarterback. So it’s fair to consider Mayfield there. I also wouldn’t totally dismiss the idea of McCarthy, maybe in a trade-down scenario or even at No. 3.

• Worthy’s 40-yard dash shouldn’t be dismissed. Former first-rounders John Ross (whose record Worthy broke) and Henry Ruggs III are two examples of how getting truly elite speed verified can send a player’s stock into the stratosphere.

• The Las Vegas Raiders and Giants are two teams I’ve heard have been asking around on a trade-up for a quarterback. It makes sense for both to research the possibility.

• Tyron Smith should be a Hall of Fame consideration. He’s been either first- or second-team All-Pro five times, and made eight Pro Bowls. But it’s easy to see why Dallas finally reached the point where it had to move on. He missed at least three games in each of the past eight seasons, so it’ll be interesting to see if Dallas’s next move is kicking 2022 first-rounder Tyler Smith from guard to replace him.

• How loaded was Smith’s draft class? Consider this: Nine of the first 11, and 12 of the first 16, picks in 2011 made Pro Bowls. And I’d say seven of the top 11 (Cam Newton, Von Miller, A.J. Green, Patrick Peterson, Julio Jones, J.J. Watt, Smith) have a case for Canton. That’s absurd.

• Commanders owner Josh Harris being in the quarterback interviews isn’t far out of line, I’d say. Remember, Buffalo Bills owner Terry Pegula was involved in similar processes in 2017 and ’18, and they wound up with Josh Allen. If things are working right, the billionaire in the room is simply serving as a valuable sounding board.

• Indianapolis Colts WR Michael Pittman Jr. will be a good barometer for how the cap increase is affecting the market. He’s a good-not-great player, and a lot of agents are interested to see if the spike in the cap helps a middle class that’s gotten squeezed in recent years.

• Carolina’s Brian Burns will be an interesting test case if he’s traded off the tag. When he still had a year-and-a-half left on his deal, at the deadline in 2022, the Rams offered a ’23 third, plus firsts in ’24 and ’25, for him. I’m not sure the Panthers will get close to that now. But we’ll see.