Trey Hendrickson was not entering a contract year, but the Bengals will push the defensive end’s current agreement into an additional season anyway. The team announced Hendrickson’s deal, via a one-year add-on, now runs through 2025.
The former Saints draftee signed a four-year, $60MM deal in 2021 and has become an impact player for the Bengals. This agreement will likely provide more guaranteed money for Hendrickson, and it stands to create some cap space for Cincinnati this year. The deal will indeed raise Hendrickson’s 2023 payout, NFL.com’s Ian Rapoport tweets. ESPN’s Field Yates tweets that Hendrickson will earn $21MM in new money, including a $5MM raise this year and a $16MM payout in 2025 (2024 remains unchanged).
Hendrickson’s initial Cincy contract includes a $15.5MM 2023 cap number and a $17.5MM 2024 cap hit. Conversations about a new deal took place last year, per The Athletic’s Paul Dehner Jr., and an unexpected resolution emerged. With Jalen Hurts, Lamar Jackson and Justin Herbert having signed, the final QB extension domino resides in Cincinnati.
Joe Burrow and the Bengals have been in talks for months on an extension that almost definitely will make the former No. 1 overall pick the NFL’s highest-paid player. The Bengals also have Tee Higgins and Logan Wilson going into contract years. This Hendrickson agreement should help on these fronts.
Hurts, Jackson and Herbert each raised the AAV bar this offseason, with the Chargers quarterback setting it at $52.5MM on his Tuesday extension. It will be interesting if Burrow aims to create a bit of a gap between himself and the field, seeing as he has quarterbacked the Bengals to back-to-back AFC championship games — a franchise first — and changed the trajectory of a previously downtrodden team. Mike Brown has mentioned the Chiefs’ Patrick Mahomes model as a potential target, but no QB extension since has followed that path. Mahomes signed a 10-year, $450MM Kansas City extension in 2020, but only one passer since — Josh Allen — has even committed to six years.
As for Hendrickson, he has shown his Saints contract year was no fluke. After not producing much during his first three seasons, the former third-round pick totaled 13.5 sacks in 2020. He collected 14.5 sacks in his Bengals debut, adding 3.5 more during the team’s run to Super Bowl LVI. Last season, Hendrickson finished with eight sacks and 24 QB hits.
Although this agreement will increase Hendrickson’s 2023 earnings, it is interesting Florida Atlantic alum would sign off on pushing a $15MM-per-year contract beyond its previous endpoint. The edge rusher market will continue to rise, especially after Nick Bosa‘s upcoming extension, and Hendrickson could have increased his leverage by entering a contract year in 2024. A 2025 free agency trip could have certainly been lucrative, assuming Cincinnati’s top pass rusher keeps up his current pace. Hendrickson is now tied to the Bengals through his age-31 season.
Then again, Hendrickson was tied to a nonguaranteed 2024 payment and would have turned 30 before a potential free agency bid anyway. Now, the productive pass rusher — whose 2021 deal included just $16MM fully guaranteed — will pick up more cash while still in his prime.
This is a surprising move, especially given the bengals 1st round investment at DE this past draft. There was a lot of whispering that he could be a cap casualty next year. Would be amazing if this article talked about any of that…instead of Burrow. Who has been talked about to nausea.
The.biggest takeaway to me on this deal and Mixon restructure are the Bengals are indeed changing how they handle there contracts which is good for the everyone. Katie having more and more say on the day to day operations of the organization have been huge. If Bengals stay on current run and break the glass ceiling and win a Super Bowl she could become a revolutionary person in NFL..
All of the extensions the Bengals give out beyond this season have nothing to do with Mixon taking a haircut for this season.
Yea, normally they’d just let him play out the contract and not cut him. They despised paying players that aren’t on their roster.
Got to hand it to the Bengals, they have done a 180 on how the team is being run. I get tired of hearing how Mike Brown is cheap and the Bengals are a mess. They have quietly become a model franchise.
The old Bengals would have picked up half dead veterans and run them out there till the wheels fell off. They’ve always been a blue collar kind of franchise, choosing the workhorse over the show pony, but now they’ve got an entire bunch of guys who want to be there and maybe aren’t the top guys at their position, but they’re in the top 10. Hope they can keep the gang together and finally win a Superbowl.