By Andrew Beaton
ET
Cincinnati has three marquee players—Ja’Marr Chase, Trey Hendrickson and Tee Higgins—all due for new contracts. Illustration: Timmy Huynh/WSJ, Getty Images (2), Associated Press, iStock
No NFL team had a more frustrating 2024 than the Cincinnati Bengals.
Their trouble started even before the season kicked off, when star receiver Ja’Marr Chase sat out of preseason activities while stewing over his contract. From there, things only got worse. The Bengals lost four of their first five games, falling so far adrift in the standings that even a five-game winning streak to end the campaign wasn’t enough to salvage a playoff spot.
But a couple of months since closing the book on that clunker of a season, Cincinnati now finds itself in an odd position for a team that failed to reach the playoffs. Suddenly, the Bengals are the center of everyone’s attention.
As football’s offseason gets under way, Cincinnati has three marquee players—Chase, fellow receiver Tee Higgins and defensive end Trey Hendrickson—all due for new contracts. Together, they could command deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars. And how Cincinnati handles this trio of complex negotiations will have major ramifications across the sport.
Figuring out what to do when several players are all seeking expensive new deals all at once would present a challenge for any club. But that’s especially true of Cincinnati, which has a history of frugality and has been reluctant to guarantee big money to anyone who doesn’t play quarterback.
As it happens, the team now has three players who have excelled at premium positions where those types of lucrative megadeals are increasingly standard practice.
That leaves the Bengals in a precarious position. They could break with their thrifty ways and keep together their talented nucleus of players, while sacrificing flexibility and resources to spend on the rest of the roster. Or they could risk watching them suit up for a rival—right as Cincinnati tries to position itself to make another playoff run.
“We want them signed. Is it easy? No,” director of player personnel Duke Tobin said. “Are we up to it? We are up to it.”
Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow, center, celebrates a touchdown with Ja’Marr Chase and Tee Higgins. Photo: Sarah Stier/Getty Images
Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow has made his position on the matter clear: He doesn’t want to see his teammates walk out the door. Burrow has also been the most notable exception to Cincinnati’s spending, when he received a five-year, $275 million contract, with most of that money guaranteed.
The problem is that, historically, Cincinnati has been loath to make that type of commitment to players at other positions. In fact, going into this offseason, no team had less money committed to non-quarterbacks than the Bengals. Instead, the team has typically been known for avoiding guarantees beyond the first year of a contract.
If anyone could make the Bengals rethink that approach, though, that player would look a lot like Chase. Drafted with the No. 5 overall pick in 2021, Chase has since surpassed those lofty expectations, turning into a game-changing playmaker. He and Burrow, who won a national championship together at LSU, are perhaps the most dangerous tandem in the sport.
But those accomplishments haven’t stopped Chase and the Bengals from reaching an impasse over a new deal. Their standoff last offseason came right as the market for top receivers was reset by a flurry of deals across the league, topped by Justin Jefferson’s contract with the Vikings priced at $35 million annually. And since then, Chase has only driven the price higher: Chase led the NFL in all three major receiving categories: yards (1,708), catches (127) and touchdowns (17) last year. Now he’s expected to reset the market as the game’s highest paid non-quarterback.
The problem is only exacerbated by the fact that Cincinnati has to make a similar calculation with Chase’s teammates. Hendrickson, 30 years old, is the exact type of player approaching the end of his prime that the Bengals have often allowed to leave. Yet coming off a year when he led the NFL with 17.5 sacks, even Tobin has acknowledged that Hendrickson, who has one year left on his deal, is due for a raise.
At the same time, Tobin also has conceded the difficulty the team faces trying to pay all of its blue-chip talent at once.
“It’s a tall task,” Tobin said. “We think we’re up to it.”
The Bengals’ upcoming decisions don’t only relate to their appetite to spend. They also have to fill out a roster within the confines of the salary cap, and their economical approach has some advantages, too. By avoiding too many guarantees, Cincinnati typically ranks among the lowest teams in dead money—or the cap space dedicated to players who are no longer on the roster.
=Bengals defensive end Trey Hendrickson is coming off a year when he led the NFL with 17.5 sacks. Photo: brad penner/Reuters
The most expendable of the bunch might seem to be Higgins, who would be the No. 1 receiving options on plenty of other teams but plays second fiddle to Chase in Cincy. Yet even during a season in which he just missed five games due to injury, Higgins showcased his value to the team by catching a career-high 10 touchdowns.
That’s why his quarterback has made it clear how he’d feel if Higgins isn’t a Bengal next year.
“I’d be very disappointed in that,” Burrow said. “Tee is a need.”
The Bengals made one step toward keeping Burrow happy on Monday when they assigned Higgins the one-year, franchise tag at a cost of about $26 million. Still, the move doesn’t preclude a trade, and Tobin said the team’s preference is to figure out a long-term pact.
It might seem like a misguided splurge for the Bengals to sign both Chase and Higgins to top-of-the line contracts. There were only two franchises last year that had a pair of receivers each making at least $25 million a year.
But there’s also proof that it can be a winning formula. One of those teams happened to be the Philadelphia Eagles, who just won the Super Bowl.
