Ryan Pace delivered the Bears a franchise quarterback by trading up in April's NFL draft. Now, finally, Mitch Trubisky has signed his contract in time to report Wednesday to Halas Hall with the club's rookies.
Trubisky and the Bears signed a four-year deal expected to be worth approximately $29 million, including a signing bonus of about $19 million. The contract is expected to be fully guaranteed. It was not immediately known whether it includes offset language, stipulations that enable the team to recoup guaranteed money in a worst-case scenario involving Trubisky being cut and signing elsewhere.
The deal includes a fifth-year option for 2021 that the Bears could exercise after the 2019 season. He was the last member of this year's Bears draft class to finalize his deal. Before Trubisky signed, he was one of five unsigned top-10 picks.
The terms of Trubisky's contract mostly were predetermined by the NFL's rookie wage scale, which has been in place since 2011. However, negotiable details do still exist, one of which is offset language.
It's common in the NFL for salary guarantees to have offset language associated with them. An offset clause stipulates that if a team cuts a player to whom it has guaranteed money, the team would owe the player only the difference between the original guarantee and the amount of his new deal with another team.
Without an offset clause, a player could double-dip, so to speak: Earn his full guarantee from the first employer, plus the full amount from his next employer.
Quarterback Marcus Mariota and the Titans haggled over offset language in 2015 before he signed eight days prior to training camp. Mariota, who, like Trubisky, was drafted second overall and is represented by Rep1 Sports, had no offset language associated with his roster and signing bonuses but did have it attached to his smaller annual base salaries.
Quarterback Carson Wentz, who also was drafted second overall and is a Rep1 client, has offset language in the rookie contract he signed last year.
Before the rookie wage scale was implemented, contracts for highly drafted quarterbacks were among the most expensive in all the NFL. The salaries and guaranteed money therein would hamstring clubs, especially if the quarterback busted.
Consider Sam Bradford's contract after the Rams drafted the Oklahoma quarterback first overall in 2010: $50 million guaranteed as part of a six-year, $78 million deal.
Such mega-deals for unproven rookies fueled momentum for implementation of the wage scale, which has since turned rookie contract negotiations from headline-grabbing dramas into formalities.
And now the Bears can continue focusing on the matter of most importance: Trubisky's development.
