Pay That Man

By Burl Rolett

Matt Forte is honoring his contract with the Bears, but now it's time for Chicago to give him a new deal. 

You could call me old-fashioned.

I’m the kind of guy that thinks a contract is a contract. If you signed up for four years, you should fulfill four years of service, regardless of the circumstances. An athlete asking for more money to play a game that many of us wait in line for hours and pay hundreds, even thousands of dollars just to get an in-person glimpse of, seems outrageous to me.

That being said, the Chicago Bears need to pay Matt Forte, and I mean pay Matt Forte, and they need to do it sooner than later.

Forte is in the final year of his rookie contract and is scheduled to make $600,000 this season. Since before training camp, Forte has been asking for a new deal, but you would never know he was in the middle of a contract dispute. That is, unless you picked up the Tribune any given day, or heard the Sportscenter anchor mention that Forte is seeking a new contract in each and every highlight.

That’s because in August, Forte was in camp every day, the NFL equivalent of punching the time clock day in and day out. The results? He torched a playoff team for 158 total yards and a score, leading the Bears to a resounding victory over the Atlanta Falcons.

Compare his performance to Titans’ Chris Johnson. Johnson, who missed almost the entire preseason for his second successful holdout in as many seasons, mustered just nine carries for 27 yards, a performance that has many a fantasy owner worried this week. Forte put the team first instead of selfishly holding out. He also did not make a distraction out of his contract demands, something that All-Pro linebacker Lance Briggs is well versed in.

And Forte decided to quietly show up to camp with a lot more at stake than most people realize.
A second round draft pick NFL running back is in a precarious situation toward the end of a rookie contract, particularly one that sees the action Forte does. He’s a three-down back, and despite General Manager Jerry Angelo’s best efforts to create a running back by committee in Chicago, he is one of the NFL’s few remaining feature backs.

A 20-touch per game guy is one hard cut, one missed block, one freak accident away from blowing a knee, losing the rest of the season immediately and a step for the rest of his career. If it happens more than once, the running back gets that injury prone tag, which is going to make getting that career deal that much more difficult.

An NFL front office knows this also though, and should be understandably cautious when throwing big bucks at that guys who get hit the most.

But while an injury can happen at any point in any football game, Forte has been very durable by anyone’s standards. He has started all 16 games in his first three seasons in the league, averaging no less than 18 touches per game each season. The only hint of an injury came after Forte’s second season. After being held to under 1,000 rushing yards for the only time in his career, Forte explained that he had been fighting a painful foot injury throughout the season.

It seemed like a likely story. If his foot hurt that badly, why hadn’t I already heard about it?

It sounded like something that a player might come up with to explain a step backwards after a great rookie season.

It was a likely story, right up until Forte took a swing pass from Jay Cutler 89 yards to the house in the opening game of the 2010 campaign, with a burst that had been absent since 2008.

The Bears also brought in Chester Taylor during the 2010 offseason. I watched Taylor spell Adrian Peterson in Minnesota with little to no drop off in years previous. I thought the signing would bring the Bears into the running back by committee game, and I even went as far as to say Taylor would have Forte’s job by the end of the year.

What followed for Forte was his second 1,000 yard season and his first year with over 500 receiving yards. Taylor, on the other hand, rushed for 2.4 yards per carry, and was coming in solely to spell Forte by the end of the year. Not at all what the organization had in mind when they inked Taylor to a four-year, $12.5 million deal.

A year later, Taylor has been released. He was picked was picked up by Arizona, and to show just what a bargain Forte has been, Taylor is still slated to make more than Forte in a new one-year deal with the Cardinals.

But Forte won’t be a bargain much longer. Next year he’ll be a very well-paid, top running back. And Angelo is going to need to break the piggy bank to keep him. And while the Bears are a comfortable $20 million under the salary cap (a luxury for a team with a franchise quarterback and three established superstars on defense), the market for top running backs just shot up.

In the past couple of weeks, Chris Johnson got a four-year, $56 million deal and Adrian Peterson blew the top off of running back salaries with a whopping seven-year, $96 million deal.

Forte isn’t in the same class as Johnson or Peterson, but a rising tide raises all ships. While I can’t speculate what the number for the next tier of running back compensation will be in offseason free agency, I’d prefer to see a deal done before that becomes a worry.

Barring a contract extension, Forte will have the chance to set the price of that second tier when he hits the free agent market this offseason with another dynamic dual-threat running back in Ray Rice, also a second round pick in 2008. Forte, while keeping a lower profile than Rice, has put up numbers that are comparable if not slightly better than Rice over their three years in the league.

But if they become unrestricted free agents together, Rice, one year younger, a little bit shiftier and much more Sportscenter ready, will be at the top of the list. He’ll get his big, big deal just hours into free agency, and Forte will have every right to demand a contract in line with Rice.

It’s also worth noting that the NFL’s leading rusher from last year, Arian Foster, will be a restricted free agent this offseason, and could help raise the compensation ceiling even higher with another stellar season.

Even if neither Rice nor Forte reaches the free agent market (recent reports say the Ravens have entered talks with Rice also), the first to sign will likely influence the price of the other, and I have a feeling Rice will get his money and he’ll get it sooner.

That is when the Bears will be at risk of losing Matt Forte. Forte will get his deal, and it will be well deserved, for not only his performance over the course of his rookie contract, but also for the risk he has taken this year.

By showing up to practice, punching the time clock every day and performing on game day, Forte is constantly putting himself at risk of that freak accident that could cost him millions of dollars this offseason.

Tackle J’Marcus Webb could land on Forte’s leg the next time he gets blown off the ball. Forte could take a rough hit fighting for that extra yard. Jay Cutler could float a swing pass just a little too high, exposing his running back to an outside linebacker with a full head of steam.

Then, Forte is out of luck. But he has honored his contract at a time when the hold out has become all too common.

Yeah, maybe I’m a little old fashioned, but Matt Forte is too.


Burl Rolett is Began in ‘96’s Midwestern guest contributor. He writes regularly at his Chicago Bears blog, Grabowskis in Exile.