When a team has good players, these players finally need to be paid – or replaced by younger and cheaper players.
Bengals, which have spent many years in decades without good players, now have a lot of good players. And their best player thinks it’s time to pay.
The quarter-Arrière Joe Burrow, appearing on the ESPN coverage of the Non-Pro Bowl Pro Bowl games, said this when he was questioned about the contractual negotiations of the receiver Ja’mar Chase, via Albert Breer de Si.com (Thank you, Bert, for looking at it so that we did not do it so): “I don’t know what he could show and do more to prove himself. We have several guys like that, who have intensified for us and deserve to be paid – deserve to be paid what they are worth. “”
Burrow is right. But it is difficult to change the scratches of Bengal. Although the collective negotiation agreement has specific minimum expenditure requirements, Brown has resisted the market value of the best players. Bengals had no choice but to do with Burrow. With other key players, they choose cheap.
They dragged their feet with Chase, for example, obtaining a triple crown for less than $ 5 million in 2024. And instead of paying the TEE Higgins receiver the type of transaction he would have obtained on the free market last March , they paid him $ 21.8 million under the franchise label in 2024. If his story never keeps a player for more than a season after applying the tag, Higgins will arrive on the free market and will leave In March.
Then there is the defensive winger Trey Hendrickson. He wanted a new agreement after a season of 17.5 racks. Bengals refused. He played for $ 14.8 million in 2024 (less than half of the top of the market) and became a first All Pro team. And now they can keep it for another season, at only $ 15.8 million.
Despite Burrow’s words, don’t expect things to change. Based on the history of Bengals, Higgins will have disappeared, Hendrickson will not have an increase and Chase will have to fight to get what it is worth.
Look at what Bengals have done with security Jessie Bates III. Instead of paying it, they applied the label, written its replacement at Dax Hill (this did not work) and let Bates leave next year. And they were ready to cut the ball carrier Joe Mixon because they did not want to pay him, until the Texans rushed, exchanged for him and gave him a new contract.
If Burrow will stay with long -term Bengals, he will have to get used to it. Except and until it is ready to specify to the team that, if they do not change, it wants a change of place.
The problem is that Burrow has five more contracts under contract. And if he never decides that he has enough, he will have to do a game of power of Carson Palmer style and hope that the Bengals will flash. What they were not going to do with Palmer until the raiders lost Jason Campbell against a broken collarbone two days before the 2011 commercial deadline and that the raiders made Bengals an offer that they could not not to refuse.
On the one hand, Burrow obtains $ 55 million a year. On the other hand, he could have to look more than a few quality teammates come and go while Bengals have trouble putting enough talent around him to get the Bengals the first victory of the Super Bowl in the history of the franchise.
