balta1701-A

The reason to do this would be to get the extra pick next year. 2nd and a 4th wouldn't be enough for me...those picks and the cap space would essentially just be spent trying to replace Forte.

What running back options could the Bears target in the 2nd round this year or in free agency? They'd need another body at that position this year, but clearing the $7 million franchise tag and coming up with another 2nd rounder this year would give them a good amount of room to overcome the loss.

If the Bears had an offer for $15 on the table and Forte wanted $16, it'd have been done 8 months ago. The Bears had an offer of $15 on the table and he clearly wanted somewhere >$20.

The other side here is that McNeil may well figure he can land a better contract after the draft, if he's had 2 more months since the start of FA to recover and teams get past the draft knowing more certainly which needs they didn't fill.

Okoye is visiting the Bengals today. Despite having a ton of cap space, the Bengals have been doing the bargain basement-depth hunting a lot this offseason, so they may make him an offer but it won't be unbeatable if the bears want Okoye back..

I'm flatly unconvinced that Hester is a reasonable full-time 3rd option, with only Weems and Sanzenbacher behind him. At the very least Hester needs someone to split time with or someone who can take his place if he's hurting like he was much of last year.

Maybe they're trying to sign some bottom-line WR and want to show him that he'd have guaranteed playing time out of the box? That's all I got.

heck, I can't figure out a good reason for announcing this step now.

If there was a huge market for Okoye outside of Chicago I'd have to imagine he'd have signed elsewhere by now.

Here's what the Trib wrote last fall. I haven't seen anything really since Angelo was fired on those numbers, but I'd have to imagine it's still ballpark.

Of course, him being there to start the year was expected, but this is still way too early in the process to say "He won't play in 2012" or "he won't play ever again". Of course, management certainly knows that's a possibility, but it's hard to guess what their motivation is for leaking this now.

Marion Barber retiring might help with that a bit. It would be really nice if the Bears could find 1 more rotation player other than Okoye before the draft. They've got 3-4 positions where it would be nice to add a borderline starter or rotation player, the ones you note + maybe WR or Safety or LB, and they're not likely to be able to address all of those in the draft.

Then he could have probably had $12 million guaranteed if he'd signed an extension 2 years ago and he'd be almost to the place where the team would have been willing to renegotiate.

Well, maybe not QB or RB.

Might help the Bears get a compensation pick next year?

Possibly, depends on how much this "Incident" hurts him. If he hit the open market, yeah, the Bears would have to pay a fairly larger amount due to his signing bonus.

Link

Because we'd be talking about it even if the decision to keep Webb there had been made already?

KC, Miami, Detroit on tap if he isn't signed beforehand.

If the Bears were looking to pass on the OT in the draft and give Webb anther shot...this would be a move that would make a lot of sense.

Yeah, but the Bears don't have an obvious #1 wide receiver who you can count on to be open after a half second. Oh..WAIT!!!!!

And Jay Cutler has 0.68 seconds to throw the ball before getting sacked.

"Motion" cameras inside a bar/club wouldn't exactly be necessary, since there would be a fairly significant amount of movement. Honestly, it does make sense to have a camera in a bar...but the problem is, the clientel might not want to have things going on in a bar recorded...especially in a high-end club.

The Bears are still sitting on at least $10 million in free cap room for this year other than their draft holds, so there ought to even be room to slightly front-load this guy.

As of earlier this week there had been no contact between the 2 sides, and there were no press reports saying negotiations had started when I checked this morning.