Wait, who said anything about 22Mil? You're the one throwing out that number. And the Cutler contract doesn't make any sense to help you prove your point. 1. Cutler was a QB. 2. Cutler had 11% (17 Mil) of a 156Mil cap. Your random 22Mil number (which nobody in this thread has agreed to pay him) would be a lower % of a 220Mil cap. And it wasn't the Cutler contract that hampered the team. They were paying over 25Mil for bad outside LBs in 2016 (McPhee, Houston, Willie Young). They were a terrible team that needed to be broken apart.
And no, you don't HAVE to spend on Roquan because there is nobody else. But if your choice is Roquan (bird in the hand) vs. a chance to sign 2-3 players for a combination of the same money you'd give him, who will also have a choice of 31 other teams, isn't as slam dunk a choice as you think it is.
OMG! Learn WTF you're talking about before saying sign him. Smith wants $22M or better. That's not per 7 years like the other moron says. That's per year. It's $100M over the contract he wants to be the highest paid LB.
If you are saying to lock him up you are saying to pay him $22M or more per year for at least 5 years. If you're not agreeing to $22M you're not saying to lock him up.
Random number my ass. Random morons on CCS is more like it.
If all Smith can do (not saying this is his limit) is tackle for gains 70% of the time you can indeed look elsewhere. There's no reason to lock that up for $22M/yr. That should be within the abilities of every 1st string defender.
Cutler's contract hampered the Bears because we couldn't get out of it without a huge cap hit. And we should've got out of it the year after it was signed. I'm the Cutler fanboy and I can admit that he was done. But then again after this Cutler fanboy saw that he wasn't going to cut it this fanboy was also saying he wasn't affordable to cut for at least 3 years and was getting called a fanboy because of it.
And what happened? Exactly what I said would happen. When the contract time was right he was gone.