The Bengals’ 2025 offseason will be defined by their ability to maintain as many core players as possible. A notable first step was foreshadowed yesterday when it was learned wideout Tee Higgins is expected to receive the franchise tag for the second year in a row. 
[RELATED: Projecting Each Team’s 2025 Cap Space]
Higgins was on track to be (by far) the most sought-after receiver in free agency, but the tag will prevent him from hitting the market. A long-term deal is the goal for Cincinnati, and presuming the tag is applied by the March 4 deadline team and player will have until mid-July to work out an agreement. Committing to a notable Higgins raise will be challenging given the contract statuses of Ja’Marr Chase and Trey Hendrickson, but keeping all three in place is the team’s goal.
ESPN’s Jeremy Fowler and Ben Baby report the Bengals aim to sign Chase and Hendrickson to long-term deals in addition to a new Higgins accord. Doing so would ensure stability at the receiver position and along the edge on defense, and it would certainly satisfy quarterback Joe Burrow‘s wishes. When speaking about the financial challenge Cincinnati faces this offseason, Burrow made it clear he would be willing to restructure his pact to free up cap space if necessary.
Negotiations with Chase took place throughout the 2024 offseason, and the team made it clear working out a monster extension was a priority. Waiting until 2025 increasingly seemed to be necessary, however, especially once Chase’s actions at training camp (which at times included holding in) did not yield a last-minute deal. To no surprise, the Bengals did not engage in contract talks with the former Offensive Rookie of the Year during the 2024 campaign.
Chase’s value was not in question entering the season, but if anything his performance upped his leverage at the negotiating table. The soon-to-be 25-year-old set new career highs across the board, topping the NFL in receptions (127), yards (1,708) and touchdowns (17). Coupled with the annual jump in the NFL’s salary cap, Chase has a clear case to surpass former LSU teammate Justin Jefferson as the league’s highest-paid receiver ($35MM per year).
That figure doubles as the high point for any non-quarterback contract as things stand. That could change this offseason, though, in no small part due to the potential for the edge rush market to take a notable step forward. Myles Garrett is in line for a new Browns pact or one which he will sign upon arriving via trade with a new team. T.J. Watt is among the veterans who could be extended at the position, meaning a Steelers raise could be in order. Micah Parsons‘ pending second contract, meanwhile, is the Cowboys’ top priority, and he could reset the market based on his age.
Nick Bosa‘s $34MM per season stands as the highest AAV in NFL history to a pass rusher, but that pact could be surpassed shortly. Despite Hendrickson’s age (30), he is in line to greatly benefit from the position’s upward movement on a new deal. The former Saint has racked up 57 sacks since signing as a free agent in 2021, including a league-leading 17.5 in 2024. Efforts to secure a raise last spring were unsuccessful, and Hendrickson’s resultant trade request was ignored by the Bengals.
With the parties in a similar situation this time around, de facto general manager Duke Tobin made it clear he is aware a lucrative new pact will be needed to keep Hendrickson in the fold. The four-time Pro Bowler is due $16MM in 2025 with a scheduled cap hit of $18.67MM; a long-term accord could allow for a new round of guarantees while lowering his immediate cap charge. For his part, Hendrickson is again open to changing teams to land a new pact, so the progress of talks with the Bengals will be worth watching closely with an outside market existing for his services.
With respect to pecking order, Paul Dehner Jr. of The Athletic writes Chase – set to play on his fifth-year option at the moment – is still atop the team’s to-do list (subscription required). Notably, he adds other pacts (including most importantly Higgins and Hendrickson) may actually get done before Cincinnati finalizes Chase’s new deal since the term and financial details should essentially be in place already. In any event, Tobin and Co. will be tasked with negotiating on a number of in-house fronts over the coming weeks.
Cinci should have done Higgins pact 2 offseason ago and gotten him at 22AAV.
They’re gonna have Burrow at 55, Chase at 36+, Hendrickson in the 30s AND Higgins in the 30s? That would be 4 players taking up well over half the cap. I know there are restructures etc but still.
Amazing how poor some of these teams are at navigating this stuff. If you want to sign a guy waiting really doesn’t serve a purpose, see the Cowboys.
Hendrickson won’t touch 30. And your right 22 would have got Higgins 2 years ago. Chase would have had a contract last year, but he tried to show up Mike Brown and come to camp but sit out. You don’t try to show up Mike Brown, just ask Carson Palmer. The Bengals don’t want to have deferred payments on these guys forever. The Reds, I know this is a football forum, just dropped Ken Griffey Jr off the books last year and he’s been retired for 10 years+ I think. Kansas City is going to be paying guys for years after they retire. Someday the bill is gonna come due and they’re going to be screwed.
The Eagles had over $50 million in dead cap this past season and that worked out OK. Teams willing to spend cash and be strategic about it have a big advantage.
It’s not gonna take that much of the cap, there will be large signing bonuses with a minimal cap hit
At some point in the length of the contract, the signing bonus hits
The Bengals should be thinking about trading some of these guys at peak value to some sucker team and bring in some fresh and inexpensive draft talent. There will be a few stars surrounded by a second-rate supporting cast. This is the Dallas formula (as some other commenters have noticed on the articles on the Bengals situation this year). Joe Burrow can restructure all he wants but the $55 million/year still has to be paid.
Talk about mortgaging the future, New Orleans style.
If their defensive drafting hadn’t gone so badly in the last few years they would be fine. Burrow’s money ain’t the problem.
I’ve never heard someone say money doesn’t matter so often since Ivana Trump was Donald’s wife. Even billionaires wives keep a better cap on expenses.
Look, guy, there’s a salary cap and it’s fixed each year, around $250 million. It goes up about 10% each year, not 25%. If a team spends all its money on three or four players, there’s not enough left to field a decent offensive line, or a good secondary, or a pass rush — or all three. Your pie-in-the-sky refinancing crossing your fingers/crossing your legs/spinning on your head voodoo arithmetic ends in either the LA Rams in the best case (Super Bowl and then bust) or Dallas Cowboys (perpetual failure with brief gleams of hope) or New Orleans Saints (cap hell forever).
I don’t know why you think each player must bleed his team dry and that there’s billions for everybody, but you are deeply mistaken. Please take some basic arithmetic courses before commenting on player salaries.
Wow, what a bizarrely hostile response to a straightforward truth. For all the weird insults you threw at me, I don’t think you understand football economics at all, or you must be very confused by the team that just won the Super Bowl.
The Bengals, like the Cowboys, screw themselves by waiting to lock up players they obviously want to keep. The Chiefs signed Mahomes the July after his third year. The Bills signed Josh Allen the August after his. The Bengals dragged it out until right before the season started, which also meant they signed him after Jalen Hurts signed for record money in April. Then Herbert had to get more than Hurts and Burrow had to get more than Herbert. So there’s one case where the Bengals bled themselves by dragging their feet.
Same thing with Chase. They could have locked him up last year and saved money. When AJ Brown was unhappy with his contract last year, the Eagles gave him a new one in April that gave him $32 million a year. That sure looks good solid Jefferson got $35 million and Lamb got $34 million. Now with a year passing, the cap going up, and an 18th game looking inevitable, of course Chase is going to expect more than $35 million.
Meanwhile, you made some weird comments about teams that restructure contracts a lot, but failed to mention the Eagles, who do it like crazy, and it’s helped get them three Super Bowl appearances and two wins in nine seasons. Basically their whole roster played for tiny base salaries this year. They carried over $50 million in dead cap money this year, much of it on void years for guys like Fletcher Cox and Jason Kelce. It’s because they’re not afraid to shell out cash (unlike the Bengals and Cowboys, who also skimp elsewhere), they lock guys up early, they spread out money thoughtfully, and they constantly accumulate extra draft picks and spend them on high value positions.
Which goes back to my original point. It’s nearly impossible to win in the NFL without good starters on rookie contracts. Outside of Chase, can you name one on the Bengals? Can you name a good starter on that defense that they drafted? Because wasting a first rounder on an edge rusher and having him not able to start a single game in his first two years has bled them dry a lot more than paying a top three receiver in football would. Notice how the Chiefs and Eagles both had six rookie contract starters on defense? That helps pay for a lot of stars. Of course, the Bengals also have the smallest scouting staff in football, so their cheapness is involved in their drafting problems, too.
So anyway, not worried about my arithmetic. Maybe you could learn something.
All you do all day long is shill for oversized player contracts. So now you want to pretend you just want the teams to pay less earlier. You are on record demanding higher payments earlier as well.
I’m exactly the guy who asks for overpriced players and thirty year old aging stars to be traded, and replaced with guys on rookie contracts. Here’s the one worthwhile insight in your post:
That’s exactly what the Bengals should do here. Bite the bullet, they’ve missed their Super Bowl window with this starting cast, and trade away their genuine star (similar to the Tyreek Hill situation in Kansas City) to a desperate and foolish front office for a couple of first round picks and cap relief.
I haven’t looked closely at the Eagles long term obligations but if they’ve mortgaged the future with endless void years and deferred payments, sooner or later the Eagles will end up like the New Orleans Saints: contending for last place in their division for seven years. In the case of the Eagles, maybe it was worth it (that’s a lot of success in three years). In the case of the Rams it hasn’t been. McVay is such a selfish toad, that he planned to quit after winning the Super Bowl and let someone else pick up the pieces.
Someone must have explained to him that he’d make himself unhireable by doing so. Your short term fair weather outlook remind me of the pig who built a straw house in the Three Little Pigs.
For whom would you like to shill for an oversized contract today?
There’s really no point in talking to you if you’re going to pretend I said things I didn’t and ignore the things I did. I’m not shilling for oversized contracts just because I’m not in denial about the market. You make dumb cracks about arithmetic when you ignore economics. I don’t think every team should pay every player the most that player can get. I think cutting truly elite players at high value positions loose in their prime is generally stupid. Keeping Burrow and Chase together is common sense. Locking up players earlier is good business, and I’ve said this many times while criticizing the Cowboys, if you’d like to pay attention to things I actually say. And much like your unhinged first response to me, your McVay comment is showing your weird bitter streak.
Your track record of shilling for oversized contracts speaks for itself. The Bengals when they paired Burrow-Chase enjoyed the benefits for a couple of years before playing behind a half-baked offensive line took its toll on Burrow and has left him playing half seasons. You’ll remember the other option when Chase was drafted was Penei Sewell.
The Bengals made a deal with the devil when they took Chase and almost won a Super Bowl. But now it’s time to cut bait. If JaMarr Chase isn’t willing to offer more favourable terms to play with Burrow and Burrow is determined to bury the Bengals with the top QB contract, then it’s over. Burrow set a bad example with his own greed, pushing an over-heated market even higher.
Which is the point that shills for top of the market contracts like you fail to understand. Once one dog gets paid top money for the position on a team, every teammate will demand the same. Dak destroyed the Cowboys for a decade with his overpriced contract. Burrow has done the same to the Bengals.
For their QB in 2024, the Eagles only paid $13 million against the cap and won the Super Bowl. We’ll see what happens as that backloaded Jalen Hurts contract kicks in. There’s $97 million on the books in 2029 on a void year (Hurts doesn’t even play).
I look forward to your eager beaver spendthrift admonitions to “just pay the man” all off-season, just like last season.
If my track record speaks for itself, then name some things I’ve actually said. Because I was right about paying Lamar Jackson when a whole bunch of people on here (including you, as I recall) said that would be foolish. I said people were wrong when they panicked about the size of Mahomes’ contract. I said the Titans were wrong not to pay AJ Brown. I said people who thought the Vikings shouldn’t or wouldn’t pay Jefferson were wrong. I said the Cowboys should quit playing with their food and sign Dak and Lamb earlier. You can call me names all you like, but I think a lot of my calls to pay guys or pay guys earlier have been correct. There are plenty of guys I would not pay their market value. Young franchise quarterbacks and young elite receivers are not among them.
If you’re freaking out about a void year in 2029, then you continue to not understand how these things work. The Eagles have lots of time to restructure things, like they frequently do. In the meantime, they’ll be scooping up comp picks as they let guys like Williams and Sweat walk this offseason. And if they need to spend a year eating their cap vegetables, they’ve shown they’re willing to do that. They did it in 2020, suffered one losing season, and then went right back to the playoffs. Even if things collapse for the Eagles, they’ve won two Super Bowls in the last nine years, which is more than 16 teams have in their whole history. Lots of teams go to cap hell without winning squat. You also decried the Rams. They also spent one losing season eating their cap vegetables, then rattled off two straight ten win seasons with playoff appearances. The Saints are different because they keep clinging to a roster that isn’t all that great and they never eat their vegetables.
Meanwhile for the Bengals, I don’t think there was a wrong choice to make between Chase and Sewell. They’re both on hall of fame trajectories at high value positions. If Burrow was greedy for setting the quarterback money record, was Hurts greedy for setting the record previously? Because his “selfishness” hasn’t hurt the Eagles. Most of the teams in football would trade draft picks for the right to pay Burrow his full contract. Teams would also trade for the right to extend Chase at full price. Those guys aren’t the reason they’ve drafted badly on defense and the offensive line, or why the owners have been stingy in all sorts of ways good owners aren’t.
In your own words, you just shill pay the man, pay the man, pay the man. Hurts was young when the Eagles signed that crazy extension and Hurts has one of the best injury histories in football. He’s only missed a game or two at most in any given season. Why don’t you talk about how paying the man has destroyed teams like in New Orleans, Dallas, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Miami just to mention a few of the recent victims. I’d add the LA Rams to the list but they did get one Super Bowl out of McVay’s gross cap mismanagement. Six seasons of purgatory to go with that one year of glory.
You: “Your track record of shilling for oversized contracts speaks for itself.”
Me: “If my track record speaks for itself, then name some things I’ve actually said.”
You: “In your own words, you just shill pay the man, pay the man, pay the man.”
If you’re going to call out things I’ve said, you have to actually call out things I’ve said. You’re also calling out things you claim I didn’t say, but actually did. I’ve talked often about how Dallas’ approach to contracts and franchising Dak foolishly made their costs skyrocket. I’ve criticized Cleveland for spending huge draft capital and unprecedented money on a sex pest with two ACL tears since the moment they did it. I’ve criticized New Orleans’ approach to money regularly.
Meanwhile, I don’t know what you think purgatory is, but the Rams have made two straight playoffs, have a fantastic young defensive front on rookie deals, and have a pretty good cap situation going forward. Also, Sean McVay doesn’t manage their cap.
If you’re going to argue with an imaginary version of me, maybe you should spend that time dealing with whatever’s actually getting you so worked up, because I don’t think it’s me or Sean McVay.
There you go mixing up sex with football again.
In your own words:
I don’t have the time to go back through your posts, which mostly say the same thing, “pay the man”. “Cheap at the price”. NFL teams have to balance the check book and so do billionaires. If a team pays individual players (non-QB) $30 million+, the season is over when those stars go down. If a team pays the QB, $50 million+, either the offensive line will suffer or the defense. With the Hurts contract, the Eagles haven’t even started to pay it. Current management is condemning future management to purgatory.
The Rams are going nowhere, despite hitting it out of the park drafts of Cooper Kupp (third round) and Puka Nacua (fifth round). The Rams are saddled with a fading QB on a high salary. Stafford was brilliant but those days are behind him. Like Aaron Rodgers or Kenny Stabler, Stafford can probably play himself slowly out of the league.
I don’t know where you imagine I talked about sex. I also don’t know what you’re trying to dunk on here. Trading AJ Brown instead of extending him was stupid. They drafted Treylon Burks to replace him and then felt they had to pay Calvin Ridley because they desperately needed a receiver.
You continue to not understand how football economics work for teams that are willing to spend. The Broncos ate Russell Wilson’s salary and went right back to the playoffs. The Eagles ate their Carson Wentz mistake and were back in the Super Bowl two years later. They can maneuver through the rest of these contracts, and more importantly, they’ve won two Super Bowls in the last nine years! That’s the goal! Like I said before, lots of teams go to cap hell without winning squat.
Your bizarre ragging on the Rams is the weirdest of all. They won the Super Bowl, have gone to the playoffs the last two years, and they have a good cap situation with an excellent young defensive front on rookie deals. They’ll have to move on from Stafford at some point, but they’ll have cap space, good young players, and one of the best coaches in football when it’s time to do that. Thinking the Rams are a bad outcome is nonsensical. I don’t know how to explain this common sense to someone who refuses to see it.
They have been bringing in inexpensive draft talent = Myles Murphy, Dax Hill, Cam Taylor Britt, Jermaine Burton among them. You seeing the problem?
let another team overpay Higgins not to win a ring .. thanks to the eagles .. the top twenty paid receivers that have won rings has doubled .. to four .. and that was thanks to a running back