Ryan Poles Cleaning Up After Ryan Pace

Analysis: Leftover salary cap mess from the previous regime has Bears needing to clean up before they can sign high-level talent in the future, so they're intent now on acquiring players to set a tone for the rebuild.

The Bears are doing what needed to be done to clean up Ryan Pace's mess.

It's a little like getting a really bad haircut, and giving yourself a buzzcut to fix it. Eventually it will look better but for now get used to the closely cropped look.

This is a way to describe what new GM Ryan Poles has been doing in his process of rebuilding the team. He has been cutting players, or trading Khalil Mack, while absorbing the dead salary cap hit this year for these players.

A dead cap hit is the remaining money of the player's prorated guaranteed bonus money. Teams are allowed to prorate the guaranteed bonus against future years of cap space. Once traded or cut, that money counts immediately against a team's available salary cap space.

The dead cap money is really piling up for the Bears because Pace overused the credit card.

Spotrac.com estimated it was at $48.6 million Saturday after the team made official its cuts of Danny Trevathan and Tarik Cohen, with June designations to improve their total salary cap savings.

The salary cap for this year is $208.2 million. This means only $159.6 million is the real Bears cap for this year, and much of it is committed to players on the roster now. 

This leaves the Bears less to spend for free agents of all types this year, although they had a little more than they anticipated because of the problem with Larry Ogunjobi failing his physical. 

They also need money for their draft picks.

Think of it all as a pie. The dead cap space is no longer available, so it is a big chunk of the pie someone cut out already. The Bears can eat what's left. It's going to be a lot less than what many other teams will have left to eat.

Dead cap money is the only thing the Bears will probably  lead the league in this year.

The Effort Guys

This all means GM Ryan Poles and assistant GM Ian Cunningham need to be extremely good at what they do in terms of finding low-cost free agents who can make the team competitive this year. It's the reason he warned everyone he would go after second- and third-phase free agents.

When you're strapped for cash but have a rebuild to do, there's one type of player particularly appealing. That's the overachiever, the effort guys who have fought their way hard for what success they've had in the league.

Almost all of their free agent signings so far are examples of this. 

Linebacker Nicholas Morrow, receiver Equanimeous St. Brown, center/guard Lucas Patrick and receiver Byron Pringle are examples of low-budget players but they also have value in another way. They have had to battle for what they could get in the league, Morrow, Patrick and Pringle having come in undrafted. St. Brown is a sixth-rounder.

Former Colts defensive end Al-Quadin Muhammad, who signed Friday, is another as a sixth-round pick. There are no better examples of effort guys than fullbacks because they do so much dirty work, and the Bears have agreed to terms with one in Tennessee's Khari Blasingame.

What's also apparent in all of these players except for St. Brown is they seem to be ascending. All were coming off possibly their best seasons and all are young in NFL terms St. Brown is someone offensive coordinator Luke Getsy had personal knowledge of, and it seemed he just was squeezed out in Green Bay with too many other receivers in the past so it was difficult to make an impact.

The Bears did start free agency with more cap space available than many teams but they also had more free agents, 26 of them.

Bottom line is it looks like a difficult to lousy year on the field but ultimately this will be a good thing.

This is because all the cap money they've shed means available space for future years, particularly 2023. They are currently projected to have over $165 million by Spotrac.com for 2023.

Until then, the best approach is lower level players on short-term contracts, like the one- and two-year deals given all of these free agents they've signed. They're letting these effort guys, overachievers prove themselves again and if they do they'll set the kind of tone for giving effort that the team wants to see in the future from the bigger ticket players.  

Ryan Poles just took over the lease on a bakery with no staff, broken ovens and no electric. Yet fans are wondering where the bagels are.

— DaBearsBlog (@dabearsblog) March 19, 2022

They will need a big chunk of their cap space still to get new contracts to Roquan Smith and possibly David Montgomery, but they will still have plenty left. They also have almost 40 players to add yet before their offseason roster is filled.

They'll find a lot about how good Matt Eberflus and his staff are in 2022, because the staff will be asked to coach up this collection of lower-priced free agents and the few remaining holdovers. Having the effort guys helps here in lieu of higher-priced talent.

Ryan Poles has yet to sign a player over 28 years old in free agency. The Bears have signed/agreed to deals with six players, the average age of that group being just over 26.

Last season, Ryan Pace signed 4 players over the age of 30 alone.

— Brendan Sugrue (@BrendanSugrue) March 18, 2022

A Possible Brighter Future

In 2023, there will be nothing holding back the new GM from finding talent in the open market. The talent level will improve.

It is the real rebuild many Bears fans didn't want to see or admit to, but this is taking place. 

The reason for all of this is the poor draft record of Pace. 

If he had drafted well, they wouldn't have needed to dive into free agency to the extent they did. They wouldn't have had to give big prorated bonuses prorated two years beyond a player's contract to many of their own free agents.

If Poles drafts well, he can begin to reverse the mistakes of the past and transform the Bears into an efficient organization from among the NFL's most wasteful ones.

Twitter: BearDigest@BearsOnMaven