Chicago Bears Will Be Swimming In Cap Space In 2017

Excitement is already building for the Chicago Bears going into the 2016 season, but for those who always prefer to look ahead, they will love what they see for 2017.

The main reason being that GM Ryan Pace has created a healthy salary cap through a series of deft roster moves. As of now they only have two players under contract who have cap numbers north of $8 million. That would be Jay Cutler ($17 million) and Alshon Jeffery ($14.599 million). The next closest is Pernell McPhee at $7.675 million. Despite some considerable spending in free agency this year on solid players like Danny Trevathan and Jerrell Freeman, the Bears still have the sixth-most cap space in the NFL according to overthecap.com

What makes that so exciting is what awaits the team next year. Barring another big move, Chicago will have an extensive amount of space available by the time the next free agency period rolls around in March of 2017. If the salary cap were to rise again (it’s at $156 million right now), they would collect even more wiggle room. Say it went up another $10 million; that would give the Bears over $56.68 million. Of course some of that would be withheld for player extension perhaps for guys like Jeffery and Willie Young, but a substantial amount will remain.

What really gets the blood flowing is the thought of a cap “carryover.” This is a term which states NFL teams are allowed to bring the space they had the previous year over into the current one. Fans saw this when the Jacksonville Jaguars added over $32 million to their cap space from 2015, allowing them to throw out a litany of deals to bring in major free agents.

As of now the Bears have somewhere between $22 and $24 million. If they were to carry that over into 2017, it could end up giving them as much as $79-81 million depending on how high the cap rises. That’s an insane amount of cash. For an idea of what that could mean for their fortunes, here is a short list of name that could be available when free agency begins next spring.

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Le’Veon Bell
Doug Baldwin
Jordan Reed
David DeCastro
Malcolm Butler
Darius Slay
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Even knowing that the majority of those names will be locked up before the market even opens shouldn’t dampen the enthusiasm for how good of a situation the Chicago Bears are in. They already have one of the youngest and perhaps most athletic rosters in the league with many seeing them as a potential playoff sleeper. One can imagine how much better they can get given that much money to spend as they wish.

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