What Tennessee gets and owes after trading Jeffery Simmons

Chicago is collecting the grades for going all in on Jeffery Simmons. Tennessee's side of the ledger deserves the same scrutiny: two first-round picks and a fourth coming in, a dead money bill staying behind, and no player in return.

The return is picks only

The Titans get the Bears' 2027 first-round pick, their 2028 first-round pick and a 2027 fourth-round pick. Chicago gets Simmons and a 2028 fifth-round pick. No players move to Tennessee. That makes this a bet on the Titans' draft room, not on a young piece already in the building.

The quality of those firsts depends on Chicago, and Chicago just showed what it believes. A team that pays two firsts for a defensive tackle expects to win, which means it expects to pick late. Two late firsts are worth less than two from a bad team.

The bill Tennessee keeps

Moving Simmons does not remove him from the books. Spotrac puts the Titans' dead cap at $14.1 million in 2026, and the 2027 charge lands between $20.8 million and $21.2 million depending on whether you take Spotrac's number or ESPN's. The gap is a few hundred thousand dollars.

Read that second figure plainly. Next season, roughly $21.2 million of Tennessee's cap goes to money already paid to a player who wears a Bears uniform. That cuts into the room the front office gained by moving him, and it is the real cost of this deal.

The money Chicago now owes

The new contract terms land on the Bears. Simmons's 2027 money is fully guaranteed at $26.9 million. His $29.8 million salary for 2028 becomes fully guaranteed if he is on the roster in March 2027. Once that date passes, Chicago is locked into another season of him, and Tennessee has no exposure to either year.

That is the part the pick haul hides. Tennessee did not only collect draft capital. It handed off the salaries of a veteran while he still commands two firsts.

Is this rebuild more flexible?

In the draft, yes. Two first-round picks from one trade give the Titans cheap starters or more trade chips, and the fourth-round pick adds depth to that pool. On the cap, the answer is mixed for 2027, because the dead charge eats into the room that his departure opens.

The test is simple. If the two firsts turn into starters, Tennessee came out ahead on both ledgers. If they turn into rotation players, the Titans paid a dead cap bill of about $21.2 million for a pair of late picks and the loss of a star.