Bear Digest

Giant dip in Bears salary cap space for free agency after trades

The trades for Joe Thuney and Jonah Jackson greatly improved the Bears' offensive line outlook but here's how deep it cut into their available salary cap space for free agency.

Gene Chamberlain

Jonah Jackson during warmups prior to training camp practice with the Lions. His contract and Joe Thuney's brought down the Bears' cap space for free agency.
Jonah Jackson during warmups prior to training camp practice with the Lions. His contract and Joe Thuney's brought down the Bears' cap space for free agency. / Kimberly P. Mitchell via Imagn Content Services, LLC
In this story:

Absorbing two contracts in trades over two days took a nice-sized slice out of the Bears' ability to strike in free agency once it begins.

According to Overthecap.com, the Bears are heading toward free agency with $43.09 million in effective cap space. They are 13th in remaining effective salary cap space. Effective cap space includes the money they would need to spend for their draft picks and for the top 51 contracts on their books.

A deal for one of the top pass rushers might run around $17-22 million a year. Pro Football Focus projects top center free agent Drew Dalman at $14 million a year.

The Bears are not necessarily done signing players but their cap space no longer makes them favorites should they get into bidding wars for many free agents. Within their own division, they've now dropped to third in available cap space. Both Detroit and Minnesota have more available cash.

Signing a pass rusher and a center would be more difficult now, depending on the quality of the player and who they are competing with for his services. 

The Chiefs had to eat about $10 million in dead cap space by agreeing to trade guard Joe Thuney to the Bears, and they inherit the rest of his $16 million contract and $500,000 workout bonus.

Since it's the last year of Thuney's contract, they'll want to get Thuney a new contract and because his  2025 cap figure includes $15.5 million in non-guaranteed cash they could convert some of the salary due into bonus money and prorate it with an extension to decrease their cap hit and create more salary cap cash if necessary.

That will make another in a series of contract extensions GM Ryan Poles will need to address. Kyler Gordon is another one, and possibly T.J. Edwards and Jaquan Brisker.

The Bears absorb an $11.8 million cap hit for Jonah Jackson's contract, including $9 million in contract and $2.83 million in guaranteed money. He still has two years left on his deal.

While the cap space is starting to dwindle, they did initially have the fifth most available initially at about $69 million and have been in a good cap situation since GM Ryan Poles undertook a 2022 rebuild by gutting the cap and cutting veterans.

Whether they actually used all their cap space over the last three years is another issue entirely.

More Chicago Bears News

X: BearsOnSI

Published
Gene Chamberlain
GENE CHAMBERLAIN

Gene Chamberlain has covered the Chicago Bears full time as a beat writer since 1994 and prior to this on a part-time basis for 10 years. He covered the Bears as a beat writer for Suburban Chicago Newspapers, the Daily Southtown, Copley News Service and has been a contributor for the Daily Herald, the Associated Press, Bear Report, CBS Sports.com and The Sporting News. He also has worked a prep sports writer for Tribune Newspapers and Sun-Times newspapers.