In a pretty stunning move, Bears starting center Drew Dalman has decided to step away from the NFL after five years in the league. Dalman, who is just 27 years old, was signed as a free agent last year by Chicago after playing for four years in Atlanta and was one of the top signings of the year having a Pro Bowl caliber season. My social media feeds had plenty of questions about what this means for Chicago salary cap so here is my understanding of how the rules will play out.
The Bears will place Dalman on the Reserve/Retired list so they will keep his rights in the event Dalman comes out of retirement in the future. Once that occurs the Bears will take on a $4 million dead money charge for the remaining proration of a $6 million signing bonus that they paid him in 2025 and his $14 million cap charge will vanish. Dalman will forfeit his $9.5 million salary guarantee for the year so the team will then save $10 million in cap room but will have a gaping hole in the middle of the line.
The Bears will have the option to claw back $2 million in bonus money in 2026 and another $2 million in 2027. Players forfeit signing bonus money when they walk away from a contract though it is up to the team to enforce the provisions in the contract and try to recover the money. The Bears would not get salary cap relief for that this season as that would start to come next season.
Though these situations are rare they are starting to creep up more and more in the NFL and the question is how will the NFL respond. Most free agent contracts see teams front load contracts with cash in order to get the player to sign with the team. That was the case here as Dalman received $18 million of a $42 million contract last year. Though he might have to pay $4 million of that back as mentioned above that would still be 33.3% of the total contract value and about 2.2 times more than he earned in his first four years in the NFL. For a player who has managed his use of money well the one time payment is really all you need to have made a lucrative enough NFL career so that you can step away from of your own accord the way Dalman did here.
Chicago will likely wonder if things would have been different had they managed his contract differently. Of the $18 million last year, $12 million was earned as salary for the year and the other $6 million came as a signing bonus. This was reasonable salary cap management as the Bears likely felt they maxed out what they could add last year and saw this as a better path to long term flexibility. That said had the Bears paid out say $16 million as a bonus, added two void years, and only paid $2 million in salary they would have the ability to recover significantly more money. Under that contract structure Dalman would potentially be responsible for paying back $12.8 million of his $18 million salary from last year. That might be enough to keep a player active or at least give the team significant financial recovery from a player walking away.
If you are smart with your cap dollars the difference simply nets out anyway since the unused cap room just carries over to the following season anyway. The Bears would still have the same flexibility it just would come in the form of salary cap carryover and an adjusted salary cap total rather than active roster spending. I would expect more teams to consider these types of mechanisms to protect their initial investments in a player in the future.