Farewell: Leonard Floyd, Edge Defender

As we approach the season, we go over all of the Bears off-season moves. Going in chronological order, and because I want to get this out of the way since, frankly, it doesn’t deserve a ton of coverage beyond being another first-round whiff by Ryan Pace, we begin with the release of edge defender Leonard Floyd. Floyd was drafted in 2016 as a raw prospect with a ton of upside that just never panned out. After a promising rookie campaign with 7 sacks in the 12 games he played, Floyd failed to need a second hand to count his sacks the following three years. The first of those was injury-shortened, the last two were just outright disappointing. Floyd’s a long, athletic player, and generally steady against the run, but the production in the pass rush just wasn’t there. Were he still on the cheap portion of his rookie contract, your author would suggest keeping him and trying him at ILB. Your author’s grading had him down for a total of only 2 negative points in coverage all of 2019. Would that scale to a full-time ILB role? Survey says: probably not and it’s certainly not worth eight figures to take a chance on that.

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