Why the Chicago Bears should extend Mitch Trubisky now

Extending makes fiscal sense

As we have stated countless times here at DaWindyCity, the Bears’ Super Bowl window is open now and will remain open for, at a minimum, the next few years. One thing that will dictate how long that window will remain open is the team’s salary cap situation.

Looking ahead, the team will have a number of decisions to make in 2021 and 2022, as a number of key players’ contracts will be expiring. Let’s take a look by year:

2021

• Tarik Cohen
• Eddie Jackson
• Leonard Floyd
• Allen Robinson

2022

• Mitchell Trubisky
• Akiem Hicks
• Kyle Fuller
• Anthony Miller

Now obviously the team will not be able to re-sign all of the above, but you know they are going to do everything they can to re-sign Tarik Cohen and Eddie Jackson. The latter will likely command a huge contract, especially considering what some free agent safeties got in the open market this offseason.

If Trubisky turns out to be what both Pace and Matt Nagy hope, and believe he will, then he will earn a huge payday as well the following year. It’s going to be a huge challenge for Pace to balance those two paydays while continuing to pay Khalil Mack through 2025.

It’s no wonder why last season, the top-six highest-paid quarterbacks failed to make the playoffs. On the other hand, the teams that did make the playoffs, for the most part, committed far less to the position.

The reason for this is pretty simple: locking down the most important position for as little as possible allows teams to fill other holes with free agent dollars. Can a team pay a quarterback a ton of money and still win consistently? Of course they can — but it significantly reduces a general manager’s margin for error. They can’t afford to swing and miss on a high draft pick or big free agent.

Therefore, if the Bears have the ability to lock up Trubisky beyond 2022 for relatively cheap, they should strongly consider it. Of course, this is predicated on Trubisky becoming the franchise quarterback Pace believes he will be.

But if he truly has conviction in his guy, then buying low on Trubisky now to avoid potentially paying him a cost-prohibitive amount in a few years, makes a ton of sense. And even if Trubisky doesn’t pan out, with the way Pace has been structuring team friendly deals, perhaps he could even limit the damage on the backend.