Brad Biggs: Keeping Jaylon Johnson is paramount for the Bears — but will they make him the NFL’s highest-paid cornerback?
CHICAGO — Teams with an abundance of salary-cap room first look to invest in their own players. It’s always more sound to build from within than to chase veterans in free agency, where teams wind up overpaying for players who, in many cases, are available for a reason.
The Chicago Bears head into a seismic offseason with a healthy cap situation. They have the eighth-most “effective cap space,” according to overthecap.com, at $36.6 million. Effective cap space takes into account where a team will be after it has met what’s called the “Rule of 51,” for offseason bookkeeping purposes, and signed its projected rookie class.
