It took a while for 2014 first-round pick Kyle Fuller to live up to his draft status, but he broke out in a big way in 2017. It was a strong enough year that the Chicago Bears gave Fuller the transition tag to try to keep him in 2018. Now the Green Bay Packers are making an effort to pull the cornerback away.
According to Brad Biggs of the Chicago Tribune, the Packers gave Fuller an offer sheet. The Bears now have the decision of whether or not they want to match.
Either way, Fuller is about to receive an extension that is likely going to make him one of the highest-paid cornerbacks in the NFL.
What is the transition tag?
Teams are allowed to use one tag — either franchise or transition — per offseason that keeps a player from reaching free agency. With both types of tag, a team has the option to match any offer sheet given to a tagged player.
But for a franchise tag, losing that player means receiving two first-round picks in return. The transition tag doesn’t reap any rewards if a player leaves.
That makes the franchise tag a much more commonly used designation, but the transition tag is cheaper. By giving it to Fuller, the Bears committed about $12.9 million to the cornerback in 2018. If he was franchised, Fuller would’ve been due to make $14.975 million.
The $2 million in savings come with the risk that a team might try to poach Fuller like the Packers did.
What is an offer sheet?
Because Fuller is tagged, the Packers don’t have the option to sign the cornerback. Instead, they can write up a deal for Fuller to sign called an offer sheet.
The Bears have no choice but to either sign Fuller to the same exact contract that was offered by the Packers, or allow him to leave and sign with Green Bay.
Is Fuller worth all of this?
Probably.
Fuller struggled badly as a rookie in 2014 and missed all of 2016 with a knee injury. His 2017 season is really the only good year he’s had. He just turned 26 in February and will probably only get better in the next few seasons. But he hasn’t proven it for very long, and it’s likely why the Bears didn’t go the safer route and give him the franchise tag.
Trumaine Johnson received a five-year, $72.5 million contract from the Jets and Malcolm Butler got a five-year, $61.25-million deal from the Titans. Fuller is two years younger than both players and had the highest 2017 grade of the three on Pro Football Focus.
According to NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport, the offer sheet from the Packers is the second received by Fuller in free agency but the first that he accepted.
The Packers can desperately use cornerback help after struggling at the position for several seasons. The team’s best cornerback in 2017 was Damarious Randall, who was traded to the Cleveland Browns earlier in March.
Will the Bears match the offer sheet?
It’d be surprising if they didn’t. According to Rapoport, the Bears plan to match the offer.
Typically when teams sign players to offer sheets, they attempt to write them in a way that can’t be matched by the other team. The most famous case was the Minnesota Vikings’ inclusion of a now illegal “poison pill” clause in an offer sheet given to then-Seattle Seahawks guard Steve Hutchinson. The deal was set to fully guarantee his salary if he wasn’t the highest paid offensive lineman on his team.
The Seahawks couldn’t sign the deal because Walter Jones would’ve made more than Hutchinson, and a fully guaranteed contract worth $49 million would’ve crippled the team.
A more common example was the Jacksonville Jaguars signing center Alex Mack to a front-loaded offer sheet with an opt-out clause. The Cleveland Browns matched the offer, but it ultimately led to Mack leaving and becoming a free agent two years later.
It’s unclear, for now, what the offer sheet looks like. But the Bears are among the league leaders in cap space. Any number the Packers are comfortable paying is one that Chicago shouldn’t have much issue matching.
The only way the Bears would be fine with Fuller going to a divisional rival is if the Packers offered the cornerback so much that Chicago is convinced Green Bay overpaid so severely that the team damaged itself. That’s unlikely.
If anything, the Packers may have just forced the Bears into overpaying a cornerback they tried to save money on. Chicago has little cornerback depth behind Fuller and will likely need to add at the position in the draft. The Bears don’t have much choice but to match the offer sheet.
Don’t expect Fuller to go anywhere.