The Bears are quite a study in the business of football. They have a 2022 payroll of roughly two-thirds of the NFL salary cap. They are playing with more of a postgraduate team than a professional team, with the vast majority of their players working on fixed and reasonable first contracts. The lack of highly paid players on Chicago’s roster is stark.
The 2022 salary cap is $208 million; the Bears have a payroll of roughly $140 million. To put that in perspective, the Bears’ payroll is:
• $18 million below the league’s second-lowest spending team, the Falcons.
• $85 million below the league-average payroll of $225 million.
• $150 million below the league’s highest-spending team, the Rams.
And that sum includes paying the bulk of the salaries of Robert Quinn ($12.2 million) and Roquan Smith ($9.16 million), two of their three highest-paid players, now playing for the Eagles and Ravens, respectively.
By now you are probably asking this question: “But Andrew, aren’t there minimum spending requirements in the NFL?” Well, yes, but if you have followed my coverage of the collective bargaining agreement, you know that I believe those spending requirements to be deficient from the players’ side. The minimum thresholds calculate teams’ spendingover three or four yearsdepending on the CBA time framerather than every yearWere there annual spending minimums in the NFL, there is no way the Bears would be compliant this year in spending roughly 67% of the cap. They are “coasting” this year, certainly planning on upticks in future years to meet the minimum thresholds (it would be hard to spend less). And they are more than happy to pay Quinn and Smith as part of the trade conditions;
In MLB terms—where there is no cap and no minimum spending threshold—the Bears are “accumulating prospects.” In NBA terms, the Bears remind me of the “Trust the Process” 76ers from a few years ago: sacrificing present results for the sake of future success. I was a neighbor of the architect of those Sixers teams, Sam Hinkie, and I remember him telling me, “Andrew, there’s no reward in mediocrity.”
Even at 3–7, the Bears have a scintillating young quarterback in Justin Fields and are getting good value from their roster with the league’s lowest payroll.
