The Bears put an original pick tender on restricted free agent wideout Cameron Meredith. Since Meredith was undrafted, they wouldn't get any compensation if another team signed him away. (For slightly more money, they could have put a second-round tender on him, making it a lot less likely another team would sign him.) Now the Saints have signed Meredith to a two-year, $9.6 million offer sheet. Chicago has a week to match.
There are two schools of thought on GM Ryan Pace's approach here, and it's a battle being waged loudly on Twitter. (I'm not a big fan of Twitter; it's a nice place for news, but a lousy place if you don't care for loud battles between people arguing with and insulting each other. Pretty much every discussion on Twitter degenerates into that before long, especially sports and I suppose politics. But I digress.)
One side is that the Bears should have given Meredith the second-round tender, so there would have been little chance of another team signing him away. The other is that the Bears are merely letting other teams set the market for and do their negotiating with Meredith. They can match the offer if it's fair, or let him walk if it's too high.
I'm on the first side, and here's why. Letting 31 other teams have a chance to "set the market" for a player will more often than not result in you having to overpay to keep him. The reason is that other teams know they have to overpay to pry a player away from his original team; have to come up with an offer that's a little unreasonable so the team holding his rights won't match. When quality players make it to free agency, they're usually gone; the market, with 31 potential suitors, escalates quickly.
If teams think other teams setting their player's market is a good thing, I guess there's no reason to keep a star player from reaching free agency. Just let other teams "set the market." But that doesn't happen too often, because the Packers quite wisely reason that if they let other teams set the market for Aaron Rodgers, the bidding would very quickly get out of control. I don't really understand why letting a player talk to 31 potential suitors about a contract rather than just you is desirable, but that seems to be the belief by Pace supporters.
Yes, if the offers get too crazy, you can let the player walk away. But...since he's a good player, why not just keep him off the market (the likely result with a player coming off a torn ACL who'd cost a second-round pick to pry away)? Then you get another year to evaluate him on your roster, for a fairly modest price. Chicago just paid Dion Sims $6 million, and has already guaranteed him $4 million more for 2018 simply by not releasing him last month, so squawking over $3 million for Meredith, who's way better, seems a little silly.
I have Meredith on a dynasty roster, so frankly I'd love to see him working with Drew Brees in New Orleans over the next couple of years. But New Orleans' offer isn't so high that the Bears won't match -- probably -- so most likely he'll be back working with Mitchell Trubisky, with Allen Robinson and Trey Burton the other main targets. And there's perhaps less competition for looks in Chicago than New Orleans, so maybe it'll be a wash.
But if they match, Chicago's going to end up paying Meredith $2 million more than they would have if they'd simply given him the second-round tender. They control his rights for 2019, quite reasonably if he has a great 2018, but if he doesn't, they'll have another decision to make (and will have overpaid him this year). Plus if controlling his rights for 2019 was important they could have signed him for two years themselves, perhaps for less than $9.6 million.
Let me know if you think I'm looking at this the wrong way. Just please keep the insults to a minimum.