Joe Mixon, Jonah Williams show how the Bengals value contracts and commitments

[CJD]

(05-06-2023, 08:59 PM)Housh Wrote: Bengals organization gets shit on for everything but no one ever talks about how Mike Brown is one of the few owners that try not to cut guys late in their contracts. We’ve done it more recently but for the most part when dudes sign here you can book it that they’ll finish their contract

This is why I always felt like Bates' war over guaranteed dollars was really silly because, historically, if you sign a 3 or 4 year deal with the Bengals, you'll see at least 2 of them, if not 3 of them even if you're injured, play terribly or otherwise are not worth the money. We gave Waynes 2 full years of his 3 year contract and he gave us, what, 5 games?

The only exception that I can think of right now is Preston Brown, who they signed to a 3 year extension in March 2019 and then waived him in November 2019. I'm not sure what happened there.

The Bengals don't do a lot of things the other teams do with the salary cap and contracts, which does sometimes make it harder to win when you're not going all in.

But our front office is REALLY good at not falling into emergency situations where good players need to be cut because they didn't plan their cap properly.

For example, the Bengals are currently in the middle of a massive Super Bowl window with a QB still working on his rookie deal. So are the Chargers, Eagles, and Dolphins. 

The Chargers' 2024 salary cap space is currently sitting at negative 79 million dollars.
The Browns' 2024 salary cap space (granted, their QB is on his second full contract) is currently sitting at negative 75 million dollars.
The Dolphins are at negative 35 million.
The 49ers, another team without a top paid QB, are at negative 30 million.
The Eagles finagled Hurts' extension to only be a 13M cap hit in 2024, they are still only at 5 million dollars in cap space.

The Bengals are, for the time being (prior to Higgins, Wilson, Reader and Burrow extensions), sitting at positive 66 million dollars in cap space.

That's crazy. 

The way we run our cap, we will basically never need to do that shit that New Orleans does, where they re-structure every single contract on the team and still have to cut a few good players just to be legally allowed to play the game!

I like that a lot about this front office, even if it's frustrating at times when it feels like the other teams are abusing loop holes in the system with things like void years.