Tee hires Ja'Marr's agent

[CJD]

(12-13-2024, 05:58 PM)FormerlyBengalRugby Wrote: Who likes a talented WR who will cost the team a king's ransom to keep, but is injury prone and cannot be relied upon to be worth said ransom?

Use that same money in the trenches, and the team improves a heck of a lot more than burning it on Tee Higgins.

He's green bean casserole! 

I empathize with this position but the Bengals are in a very unique position.

They are going into the offseason with at least 60M in cap space, less than 1 million dollars in dead cap and they've set up their cap space such that they have no reckoning coming any time soon (unlike similar teams like the Eagles). And we could have even more if we cut some of the dead weight on this roster like Sheldon Rankins, Geno Stone, and Sam Hubbard.

Tee Higgins is a top 5 free agent in the entire NFL this coming off season. I would argue he is the 4th or 5th best player on this team (behind Burrow, Chase, Trey and maaaaaaybe Brown Jr).

We also happen to have virtually no big free agents that we must sign because our 2021 and 2022 NFL draft classes have not yielded many impact players.

I was looking at a list of free agents in 2025, and there is no star pass rusher on the market. At least not one that we would consider signing. Khalil Mack is out there, but he's going to be 34 next year. 

There are a fair number of safeties, who I wouldn't be opposed to signing, but if our front office was interested in giving a premium contract to a safety, we probably would have just signed Bates.

My point is, we will have a lot of money, very few high priced internal free agents set to leave and the market does not really have premium players at our biggest areas of need on defense. If we have a free agent, who is top 5 player on our team and a top 5 player on the entire market, and he wants to be here and seemingly willing to work with the team in some nebulous way to make that happen (even going so far as to fire the agent that the Bengals have struggled to make a deal with)....why let that kind of player walk out the door?