While the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers prepare for Super Bowl 58, the other 30 organizations have already directed their attention to the NFL Draft.
This year's event will take place over three days in Detroit, Michigan from April 25-29.
The Bears, who hold the No. 1 overall pick, aren't the only team whose future hangs in the balance of the draft. Every team, every year is looking to improve through all seven rounds.
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So how many picks does each team get? Well, we don't know. And it changes every year.
There are seven rounds in the draft, and all 32 teams have one pick in each round, which means that 224 total picks are guaranteed. Teams, of course, can trades picks, and many wind up with more or fewer picks than the originally allotted seven.
Here's where it gets tricky.
Each season, the league hands out extra picks to teams that lost more valuable players via free agency than they signed. A variety of factors are used to determine the "value" of such players, including salary, playing time and postseason awards. Those compensatory picks fall at the end of each round in Rounds 3-7. Last season, the NFL awarded 37 compensatory picks.
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Right now, the Bears are not projected to earn any compensatory picks. According to OverTheCap, the two free agents of note they lost were David Montgomery and Riley Reiff, but those are outweighed by the signings of Tremaine Edmunds, T.J. Edwards, Nate Davis, DeMarcus Walker, Andrew Billings and Robert Tonyan.
Teams can expect to know how many picks they will have by early-to-mid March, a little over a month before the draft.
These are the picks the Bears currently own the rights to in the 2024 NFL draft:
- First Round, No. 1
- First Round, No. 9
- Third Round, No. 75
- Fourth Round, No. 110
- Fourth Round, No. 122
- Fifth Round, No. 142