Angelo: Bears won’t spend big in free-agent market
INDIANAPOLIS — Assuming that NFL players and the league eventually hammer out a new collective bargaining agreement this year, there will be free agency. But the Bears won’t make the kind of splash they did last year in the marketplace.
Signing Julius Peppers to a six-year deal that could be worth as much as $91 million was a difference-making maneuver, but it isn’t something any team can afford every year.
“It’s a difficult thing to do,” Bears general manager Jerry Angelo said Friday at the NFL Scouting Combine. “You don’t want to come out every year having to spend big chunks of money on one player. That’s not the goal.
“We determined that was a unique situation, and that was really an aberration of free agency. We thought he was a special player, obviously he was a fit, he was a need, and we felt like that was the right thing.”
The draft will go on as planned, even in the absence of a new CBA. But the Bears and every other NFL team are in the dark when it comes to free agency. It’s supposed to start at midnight March 3, but free agency cannot begin without a new CBA in place. And until that happens, teams also don’t know what the salary cap will be.
There was no salary cap last season because the owners opted out of the CBA, but it was $123 million in 2009 after it had gone up by 7 percent for the 2007 season and 6 percent for ’08 and ’09.
“We have to hypothesize and we have on certain cap numbers,” Angelo said, “and we have to do our scenarios and we have our budget that we operate within. We have to have ‘guesstimations’ on that.”
The Bears landed the biggest fish in the free-agent pond last year in Peppers. But expectations should be scaled back this time around.
“Can we get the big fish (again)?” Angelo said. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen the bait yet, and until I know how much bait we can put on the hook, I don’t know that we can get the big fish. That’s going to be determined once we have a clear understanding of where the cap is.”
NFL teams in the past have justified spending millions on one big-ticket item in the belief that they are just one player away from getting to the Super Bowl. Angelo doesn’t buy that philosophy, he doesn’t feel the Bears are in that category, and he doesn’t believe the solution is that simple.
“It’s not something where I feel like we’re one player (away),” he said. “We’re not one player away. I have seen teams do that. I have been part of teams that have done that. That hit or miss rarely hits, so we don’t want to get into that mind-set. “When we do things, there’s got to be a plan in place. We need to get better at (multiple) positions. We need to upgrade, create more competition, and then we’ve got to come together as a team.”
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