Rahimi, Harris & Grote Show - How seriously should the Bears consider trading for Maxx Crosby? | Take The North

Episode Date: February 12, 2026

From 'Take The North' (subscribe here): Dan Wiederer and Mark Grote discuss the idea of trading for Raiders star defensive end Maxx Crosby. How serious should the Bears be about making this type of move? To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's good, y'all? It's Von Miller, Super Bowl MVP, Sagmaster, and now you're a host of Free Range. This is where NFL meets Real Talk. Every week, I'm bringing you inside the game from locker room stories to league-wide headlines. You want football IQ locker room insight and real conversations with the people shaping the league. Welcome to Free Range with Von Miller, where nothing is off limits and every down counts. New episodes every Wednesday. Listen and follow Free Range with me, Vaughn Miller, wherever you get your podcast. If it truly is all in play, that leads me perfectly in to a man named Max. And not just Max, he has two Xs in that name.

That's double X. Max Crosby, the word out there, the word on the street is that he reportedly told Tom Brady, who is owner of the Raiders, the team for which Max Crosby plays, that he will never play for the Raiders again, which has every team, just about every team in the National. football league saying, huh, how could we make this work? And Chicago, Dan, is not the exception. Can the Bears make that work in any way, shape, or form? Max Crosby to the Bears. This to me, as we sit here on February 10, 2006, seems very far-fetched for a lot of reasons. The first reason being the Bears currently for the 2006 new league year, when the calendar flips next month in league standards, they are already over the salary. cap. They've got to get under that before the new league year starts. And so you're already pressed up against the cap. And yes, you can restructure some deals and you can move some money around and do

stuff. But every time you restructure a deal, it basically puts the weight on your cap in future years. And so you might want to do that for 2026, but it's going to come to really knock on your door and be really a heavy burden in 2028 or 2029 or whatever those bills come due to pay. The other part of this is to get Max Crosby, you do have to do more than just sign him. You have to trade him. And like if you use the Parsons trade from last year as a little bit of a guideline, the Packers had to give up two first round picks and a three-time pro bowler and Kenny Clark just to get Micah Parsons.

And then once they got Micah Parsons, they had to give him a contract with an average annual value of $47 million a year in it. Right. So you talk about the cost of Micah Parsons for the Green Bay. Packers and they won nine games. And I get it. Micah got hurt and you weren't anticipating him to get hurt. But like that's the dice roll that you're making when you go all in. And so this is where I know you've brought this up on your show on the radio a bunch that like this swell of expectation in Chicago is going to need something at Hallis Hall to pull it back

down a little bit to remind people what the ultimate goal is. And while the goal is to win a Super Bowl next season. It's also to give yourself the maximum amount of swings to be in play to win a Super Bowl. And when you do this like all or nothing move, like it's going to be, you know, in the next couple of years that we've got to win it or else, you're limiting your ability to contend and sustain success down the road. And so I'll leave it back over to you there. It just feels like this conversation has gotten to an unrealistic level in the public forum. And it feels like you just need to remind people of the dynamics and the constraints and the parameters at play here. Yeah, and you're right.

It is predictable. And it's just now beginning. I mean, we haven't really had the big wave yet. It's too soon, as we said, the season just ended with the Super Bowl. But once everybody gets back on the NFL wagon, and of course, the combine is coming right up. And then the draft, that's where I'll put it. Wait till the draft. That's where it's going to get real loud.

When the bears come up, they're going to talk about the expectations that the bears are going to have you. We're going to hear things in Vegas about. Caleb Williams being one of the favorites for MVP. It's all very possible and plausible. I think that, yeah, it's hard to imagine a scenario where they would make that massive of a splash. I feel like in general, the bears are in hiring from within mode, wanting the players that they have. And that doesn't mean that there's not going to be fresh players on this team. I mean, you alluded to it on the interior.

Are they really going to roll back everything that they had on that interior? But Grady Jared is an example of one of the players that you look at and say just to use him and there's others. Di O'Dango. Be healthy. Come back. Hire from with it. The guys that you have, a guy that you basically didn't have last year in O'Donbo,

much more will be expected from him. I've talked about Shamar Turner. Yeah. Second round pick. You don't know what? That's not nothing. So you got to, you still have to rely on, depend on some of the guys that you have not

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That's the quintessential example of return on investment, right? Like ROI to the max in the NFL. And when you invest with either free agency money or premium draft capital, you need to get the return on investment in order to be a contender in this league. And so you mentioned a few guys there, Dengbo, Turner. You can throw Montez Sweat on that list. You can throw Grady Jared, obviously.

We talk about Billings back. He's a free agent, and I don't necessarily expect him to be back. And then you look at the secondary and you've got Jalen and you've got Kyler. And if you decide to bring Bayard back again, now you need to return an investment on that. On the office side of the ball, you've got this interior of the offensive line that you've invested heavily in. You need ROI. Caleb Williams is the number one pick in the draft. Well, guess what?

Colston Loveland and Roma Dunzee are top ten picks. ROI. Those are the types of investments that you need to pay off in order. order to contend. Here's one other thing. I'm going to give you a little pop quiz here since we've gotten really into pop quizzes here lately. I'm going to name a bunch of teams and you're going to tell me what they have in common. Okay. Seahawks, Rams, Packers, Ravens, Bills, Chiefs, Patriots, Chargers, Eagles, Lions, 49ers, Broncos, and Jaguars. All teams with a quarterback on their second contract. These are all teams that currently have better odds to win the 2026 Super Bowl than the Bears.

okay and so this is just a reminder because i think there's been this like swell in this town that it's it's it's the bear's time right like they had this breakthrough season they've got this really promising head coach they've got this really talented quarterback who showed notable growth last season you know who else's time it is all those teams that i just listed for you right like every person in every one of those cities believes that they are in position to go make a run at a super bowl next year and so you can't just sort of pat yourself in the best and say we won a division. We had all these exhilarating moments. Therefore, we are the de facto favorite to go get the next Lombardi trophy. Like, that's not how it works in this league. And it's just a

reminder, because I think that, you know, the swell of euphoria here really since the season ended has been so massive. And it relates to what we talk about, about offseason expectations. You just got to remind yourself, like, that's the class that you're in. There's a lot of teams that are expecting to have a chance to make a run next year. And that's why I bring that up in the context of the Crosby conversation because it's not like the bears are one piece away. Like you know what I mean? One piece probably jumps you over five of those teams, you know, but not all 14 of them. Yeah, no, it's it makes you better. And I think you, I know, you or I, we have done it often, you know, just alluded to tales of the past in the, in 2018,

and then what happened right away in 19. Now this season is different because they actually won a playoff game, but we've all seen where we thought the bears were a win away or a player away, a move away from getting to the next level. And sometimes you're simply not. Yeah. And look, like that was stated very clearly by the head coach when he closed the doors and the book on the 22 and 25 season. Like that's going to be the message for many, many months here as they try to reconstruct this thing and kind of realign it to go again, like the goal here ultimately is to win the Super Bowl. But in order to win the Super Bowl, you've got to give yourself the maximum number of chances to be in the postseason and then get hot one of them

and go make a run like Seattle just did and then shower and confetti and everything else's history.