Creative Indeed. Pace is a Master

Most meatball fans have no idea of how the salary cap works, how comp picks are awarded, what a player's realistic trade value is, etc, etc.  Many of them scream about FA signings (or non-signings) without even considering that a contract requires both parties to agree.  IOW, sometimes a player wants something different from what a GM wants even if the money is there.  

Getting back to the current situation, fans who are mad about the offseason thus far obviously had very unrealistic expectations going in.  Anyone with a clue knew in advance that we weren't going to be major players in FA (which is actually a GOOD thing).  It appears now that Callahan might have priced himself way too high at the start of FA and Pace quickly moved on to other options and signed a cheaper replacement.  Amos got paid beyond what he was worth to the Bears as probably their 10th or so most important defensive starter.  We couldn't, nor shouldn't, have paid $10m/yr for a player who is solid but hardly critical to the D.  HHCD is a much cheaper alternative.  Everything else Pace has done has been low-budget stuff to shore up STs and offensive depth.

About the only thing I can criticize him for is that maybe he could have waited a while and gotten Davis cheaper.  Didn't seem to me that a backup RB needed to be a day 1 signing.

As for what's to come, assuming this report is true and we still have ~$18m in cap, the only thing of consequence I see Pace still needing to do is to add a 3rd OLB if Lynch leaves.  That's pretty much it.  The rest of the year is the draft and some vet min & UDFA camp bodies.  Anything else missing?

Told people last year that this was going to happen after the Mack trade. You just cannot hit FA as hard as the Bears did last year including that trade, and continue to be active the next few years. 20-30mil sounds like a lot, but when it's at the bottom of all the other teams w/cap it's small. And to be honest, there should be much you need to do after last year if the GM did his job correctly, and he did, and the Bears didn't. 

I never saw them making a major move in FA this year, seems like they always keep 8-12mil in free cap for signings during the year. W/16 mil that means 1-2 small moves, and they migth do that after cut downs.

Exactly ^^^^

Im amazed some fans thought this years FA was gonna be anything like last years.  No way it would be and that is A GOOD THING.  Teams that are spending big and constantly churning the roster in FA year after year after year are almost always pretty bad teams.  

Think about it—the only way a team has gobs of cap space every year to do that is because they obviously aren’t re-signing their own draft picks when they come off their rookie contracts very often.  In other words, they’re drafting poorly, which means their 3rd & 4th year players aren’t very good, which means they aren’t getting retained, which means the team has a lot of holes (and cap) that otherwise they wouldn’t have if their personnel moves from a few years back had panned out.  

Take a look at a microcosm example:  does anyone think Ryan Pace would have had to pay big money to get Allen Robinson last year if Kevin White had been a successful draft pick?