balta1701-A

If the Bears bring in a RB, I think you have to expect that Wolfe drops to #3, and Peterson gets treated mainly as a special teams person unless someone gets hurt. I hate the idea of giving up on 2 high picks as quickly as the Bears would be giving up on Benson and Wolfe if they spent another high pick on an RB or paid a lot of money for one, but if the team has soured on those guys that quickly I'm not sure I can argue with it. I still think the correct move right now is to beef up the O-Line and try to turn the guys they do have in to something useful, but I'm not there when they practice, I'm not on the sidelines, and I don't know how the guys really are when they're together.

I don't think the Bears can possibly choose their pick based on what other teams can do, can they?

I think I agree pretty much with this and it's more simple than my point earlier. Boldin is clealry worth a 1st to someone, but I don't think he's worth a first to the Bears. A team like where the Patriots were last year for example, or where the Chargers were before they traded for Chambers, or where the Seahawks were when they dealt for Givens...where they feel like they're 1 big play WR away from a super bowl run, then he's worth that high pick or two to them. But until the Bears at least get their QB situation settled, it doesn't really help them to go spend money and lose first rounders on WR's.

It really seems now that they don't have much choice.

Give me a couple hours to get some actual work done and I will post exactly the poll you mention. I'm not certain where the best point is to draw the dividing line between what goes in the Bears forum and what goes in the NFL forum, and a good chunk of this site is adapted to rules that I'm not. I'll put a poll up in the Bears forum in a couple hours and we'll see what people think the dividing line should be. It's not my goal here to be some sort of evil dictator forcing everyone to stay in line, just to try to keep things working smoothly for everyone. We don't want to lose you because a few threads get moved.

I think this would be an excellent move. His injuries have more than likely dampened his value, he could well be a legit value signing, and he fills the hole of a guy to run next to Benson if he does stay healthy. This would narrow the list of places where the Bears would likely want to spend a draft pick more towards O-Line, and give them one last year where they go with Benson since he's still under contract and hard to cut at this point.

In a world of infinite cap space, infinite draft picks, and infinite players to trade for other players, that argument works. The problem is, none of those things are infinte. If the Bears had a choice between giving up a 2nd rounder for Boldin and using a 2nd rounder to draft that other guy, the trade might make sense...if the Bears have the cap room for an extension without losing someone else (Harris/Hester?). If you thought of the deal as Hester and a 2nd for Boldin because Boldin's contract meant that you couldn't resign Hester...that deal wouldn't look very good to my eyes. If it costs a first rounder for Boldin and you have to extend him, or you can get the other guy in the 2nd, the odds are that the Bears are better off with the draftee. And so on.

Well, the question is...what would you give up for him? If you traded for him you'd be expecting to dump a bunch of cap room on resigning him right away, and the Bears aren't exactly in a position where they could afford to part with their first rounder for most players given their O-Line weakness.

I read an article in late October saying that after the Vasher and Tillman extensions, the Bears had the least amount of cap room remaining in the league, something like $600k or less by the end of last year. He used every scrap.

Link.

Unfortunately, this forum has been pretty darn dead. So at least for now, I'm going to try to keep signings that don't involve the Bears explicitly moved in here. It's perfectly ok to discuss the Bears here, but it's wroth a little effort to try to keep this forum moving and to keep stuff surviving on the front page of the Bears forum.

But also...the team needs to make sure they use that cap space. They've filled a few of their holes with bargain basement guys, but they also have a few guys that they don't want hitting the FA market. That cap space can easily be used to preemptively sign these guys.

If we're planning on targeting the O-Line heavily in the draft, it makes sense to save up the cap space in FA to use on other guys/holding on to key parts currently on the team, at least to my eyes. On top of that, the draft itself is pretty heavy in O-Linemen, so this is potentially a good year to find decent value at those slots in the draft. Hopefully, the fact that some of these teams that could have used O-Linemen (The Jets?) have jumped on big ones in FA might well serve to push players down as well.

This really doesn't involve the Bears at all, so this is moving to the NFL forum.

In terms of these 2 positions specifically...I would argue that it was the complete disaster that was the O-Line last year that kept them from looking better. I could well be proven wrong in that assessment, but I'm not willing to write off any of the guys the Bears have in their backfield when Benson was being hit 2 yards behind the LOS every play and Grossman was making half his throws on the way to the ground.

At least 2, preferably 3 new Offensive linemen. That's the Bears' biggest need. By far.

He won that award running behind an O-Line with Walter Jones and Steve Hutchinson in it.

Reportedly, the cap hit for the Bengals by trading 85 would be $8.03 million.

Alexander hasn't been worth his contract since the moment he signed it. Question is, how much damage does it do to the Seahawks to cut him?

They would have to take a really big cap hit to trade him, that's probably the biggest problem.

Are there really any left that are worth spending cap room on in FA?

Ok, I moved a bunch of recent threads from the Bears forum to this one, and from now on I'm going to enforce it a little bit more...if you want to talk NFL news about a player that the Bears didn't have and didn't sign, I'm going to move it here.

Well...if the area between the Tackles is full of defenders who you can't block, Hell why not send the guy outside on occasion?

That he's no longer strong at that or that the Bears had a wasteland from Tackle to Tackle last season?

Then given that almost anyone other than DT's and DE's are going to be discussed as potential replacements, that's going to keep this thread pretty dead until Belichek gets caught cheating again.