Did Chase send a not so subtle message to Joe?

[CJD]

(02-16-2023, 04:21 AM)casear2727 Wrote: "Is it going to be difficult to keep two #1's on the same team?"

Chase has an answer and then pauses and giggles, saying "I really don't know", but it seemed like he did know.

But then Chase surprisingly continues and says the following:

"At the end of the day somebody is going to have to do something for us to have this team stay together"

Jump to 6:10 for the exact quote.  I'm not looking too much into this am I?

Hmm, I'm not sure he means Joe. It felt more like a statement to management. Like "You guys are gonna have to work this thing out if you want to keep the 3 of us together."

And they kind of are. Taking on additional sponsors, selling the naming rights to the stadium etc. Those things will help with the cash flow required to sign these three. 

Now all they have to do is work out the salary cap.

With more and more money pouring into the NFL each year, I think the sooner you can sign the three of them, the better. I would really like us to sign Higgins to an extension this off season. In 2018, I remember Mike Evans signed a huge contract for 5 years, 82.5 million dollars. The highest in NFL history for a WR, if I remember correctly (although I can't find any articles saying this, so maybe my memory is failing me) just over Hopkins' 5 year 81 million dollar contract that he signed the previous year (Larry Fitzgerald and Calvin Johnson's biggest contracts were floating around 16.2M per year, with Evans' being 16.4M AAV).

He is on that contract this year and it's a ***** bargain if I've ever seen one. They used void years (12M in 2024, 4.8M in 2025, 2.6M in 2026, but he's a free agent after the 2023 season) to stretch out the time tables to allow them to keep Chris Godwin as well. From 2019 to 2022, Evans' cap hits were 15.M, 8.4M, 7.7M and 10.3M, respectively. His cap hit this year is the highest it will be on that contract at 23.7M but, honestly, that's still a good deal haha. That's millions less than what Tyreek Hill's AVERAGE cap hit is over the length of his contract.

So the sooner we sign Higgins to what, at the time, will be a record breaking deal, by the time he's in the final 1 or 2 years of that extension (right around the time Chase's numbers will start to rapidly escalate), it will be a bargain by any stretch of the imagination.

The only question is, will the Bengals be willing to fully utilize void years to keep this window wide open? Or are they just too traditional to do that?

They did sign Riley Rieff to a 1 year contract with 1 void year on it to stretch out the cap hits (4.7M in 2021, 2.8M in 2022), so it's not a completely foreign concept for them. It will just have to be done a much larger scale if they realistically hope to keep Higgins and Chase together past both of their rookie contracts. It's going to take some creativity, but other teams have shown the ability to do it. The blue print is there.