5 Key Players Bengals May Have To Get Rid Of This Off Season

[CJD]

(02-07-2023, 03:03 PM)ochocincos Wrote: You could argue Boyd isn't quite.

He's 30th highest WR in terms of AAV.
He's the 25th highest WR based full contract.

Boyd was 43rd in receiving yards this past year.
39th the year before.

The reality is Boyd was given his contract at the time to be a good WR2.
He'd likely be a good WR2 on most teams, but in an offense with Chase and Higgins, his production is more limited.

Boyd the past two seasons:
2021 - 828 yards
2022 - 762 yards

Boyd is set to count $10.285 mill this year, only $1.4 mill dead cap if team moves on.
Cap savings of nearly $8.9 mill.

Can a (much) cheaper veteran or a draft pick put up production like that in the Bengals offense and allow the Bengals to repurpose that saved money elsewhere?
I would argue they could. It's also possible the replacement player does not though. That's the gamble you take when you decide to replace a player.

I think the most limited resource on this offense is targets and we saw that with Boyd. With Chase already absorbing more than a third of the WR targets there will inevitably be less than a player's "fair portion" of targets to go around. 

Boyd only had 82 targets (a consequence of being the 3rd or 4th option on many plays) but he led all Bengals Wide Receivers with a catch percentage of 70.7%, he was second among Bengals Wide Receivers in first downs per reception of 0.707 and first downs per target at 0.5 behind only Irwin and his 15 receptions (small sample size). And he wasn't that far behind Higgins in yards per reception with 13.1 to Higgins 13.9 (both higher than Chase's 12.0). 

It would be unfair, I feel, to penalize Boyd because he happens to have two of the best receivers in the NFL ahead of him. He still performs his job magnificently and I don't think you'd be able to improve the slot receiver role with ~$10M AAV in free agency. 

With that said, I do concede that on strictly a yards and touchdowns basis, Boyd may be the least "overperforming" of the contracts mentioned in the original post.