NFL sets salary cap at low end of original forecast, tightening Bears' offseason crunch
INDIANAPOLIS — The NFL salary cap is going up substantially this season, but not quite as high as initially anticipated. That could make things slightly tougher for the Bears as they try to navigate what already was going to be a tight cap crunch.
The league set the cap at $301.2 million Friday, which is an increase of $22 million from last season and a staggering $76.4 million jump from where it stood in 2023. However, it was at the bottom end of the projected range the league gave teams a month ago when it said to plan for between $301.2 and $305.7 million.
A few million dollars isn’t earth-shattering in this world, but for a team counting every penny like the Bears, it makes their offseason a bit more challenging. The final number means they’re now $6.4 million over the cap, which they need to fix by the start of the new league year March 11.
Getting themselves cap-compliant is relatively easy and will be more than solved by the expected trade or release of linebacker Tremaine Edmunds, but the team will need to clear additional space to re-sign priority free agents like safety Kevin Byard, address significant holes in their starting lineup on both sides of the ball and pursue upgrades as they try to exceed what they did last season.
Most of their highest paid players have multiple years left on their contracts and don’t have an affordable out this offseason.
Wide receiver DJ Moore, for example, is their most expensive player this season with a cap hit of $28.5 million and is just beginning the contract extension he signed in 2024. Moore is signed through 2029, and the dead-cap number doesn’t drop to a reasonable amount until after the 2027 season.
The Bears likely will restructure or extend some veteran players to create space, but general manager Ryan Poles is resistant to kicking too much money down the road because, as the team experienced under predecessor Ryan Pace, that eventually leads to an untenable situation.
“There's some things you can do — you all have seen that before I got here,” Poles said this week. “You can accelerate [roster building] and then it goes away pretty quick... Do you want to go all in and hurt yourself down the road? Our mindset is to do win now and then be able to sustain that and have flexibility.
“It's not going to be easy. We've been really good with dead money, [but] at some point that's going to go up because that's just the nature of playing this out over a long period of time and having tough decisions to make.”
The teams with the most salary-cap space going into next season are the Titans ($94.9 million), Raiders ($89.2 million) and Jets ($88.8 million). The defending champion Seahawks are sixth at $59.6 million, and the Patriots, who lost to them in the Super Bowl, are 10th with $40.4 million.