Bears' Robinson says he wants to stay, but time may be running out for new deal

Let's talk for a minute about what we do know about Allen Robinson.

He is one of the classiest guys ever to wear the navy and orange.

If there was one player on the Chicago Bears I did not expect the media would get to visit with Wednesday after A-Rob blew up social media with a deep cleaning of his Instagram and Twitter accounts that had nothing to do with the current public health crisis and everything to do with eliminating any trace of his current employer, there was No. 12, first man up in the Wednesday players Zoom conference.

And he showed with nary a disparaging word for anyone in the Bears organization.

In fact he doubled down on his desire to remain a Bear for life.

"My heart and spirit has never wavered as far as the city of Chicago and playing for this organization," Robinson said.

"Obviously you dive into the business of the game and there's different variables that go into that. But how I feel about my teammates, how I feel about this team, how I feel about this city and everything like that has never wavered.

"To answer your question, I feel the same way how I've felt prior."

All of which just further accentuated the question, how could Ryan Pace and company have allowed it to come to this in the first place.

Prior to talking with Robinson, Matt Nagy took a crack at lowering the temperature by saying, "You know how we roll here, we talk about things and so I had a great conversation with Allen, just excited about where we're at.

"He's a leader, he's a very important part of our team.

"As far as the other part of it, that's not my world. That's both sides to deal through that, but I think that our players all realize the history that we have here in regards to taking care of guys, you know."

Yes, we do know and Nagy is right.

For wherever else the Bears may make mistakes, these kind of family squabbles involving the most important players on the team just haven't happened here in a very long time.

So why now, and why with A-Rob?

Those questions were left unanswered and while the talk has been dialed down for the moment, if a deal doesn't get done much sooner than later it will be back and more explosive than ever.

Not only is Robinson one of the most important players on the team for his leadership, character, ability, production and dependability, if the Bears have any hopes of salvaging Mitch Trubisky they can't minimize or eliminate Robinson.

I asked Mitch how he felt about the importance of his number one target and he left no doubt where his head and heart are.

"I mean Allen is just so reliable, you can go to him in any situation and the thing about him is when he's not open, he's still open. So just put it in his area and he'll go make a play for the offense.

"That's my guy. We all love A-Rob and we know what he brings to this team. And they've just got to get that done."

The deal itself just shouldn't be that hard.

The top guaranteed deals in the league right now are Beckham, Jr. ($65 million), Julio Jones ($64 million), Michael Thomas ($60.5 million), Deiondre Hopkins ($60.05 million), Amari Cooper ($60 million) and Michael Evans ($55 million).

The top averages per year are Hopkins ($27.25 million), Jones ($22 million), Keenan Allen ($20.05 million) and Cooper ($20 million).

Forget the endless debates about who's the best and how to rank them, which of those players is more valuable to their team than Robinson?

The deal should be five years at $95 million to make it cap friendly the next two seasons with between $55 million and $60 million guaranteed, and it should be done tomorrow.

With where this team is at and A-Rob's place on it what the Bears need to understand is right now he's holding all the cards, and by showing up today and playing the good soldier all he did was tighten his grip on them.

If the Bears don't get this done in the next week-to-10 days this could snowball into a disaster this regime never recovers from.