Too old, too expensive for us

[*TheLeonardLeap*]

(Yesterday, 02:07 PM)bengalfan74 Wrote: Thanks

I get it with Zeitler and how he wasn't worth the top dawg money he wanted. Still, the Bengals F.O. is notorious in not wanting to pay lineman upper 1/3 money back thru the years. And many other positions/players.

And it has hurt us....sometimes very badly.

When he signed for $12m/yr there were only 6 guards making at least $10m/yr. The 10th highest paid guard was making $8.5m/yr. The interesting thing is the top 4 highest paid guards of 2017? 3 of the 4 got paid that offseason and not a single one of the 4 finished their contracts on the teams they signed them with.

If Zeitler signed for $9-10m/yr, I would have wanted the Bengals to match it and would have been upset if they didn't (he ended up years later signing with the Ravens for $7.5m/yr and we certainly should have got him then). But 20-33% higher than that was a severe overpay and you can't make a habit of trying to outspend shitty teams for good-not-great talent. It'd be like getting in a bidding match with the Jags over Christian Kirk in 2022 or bidding against the Raiders for Christian Wilkins this year.

Ultimately the problem wasn't that we didn't re-sign Zeitler for way too much money, it's that we half-assed (or even quarter-assed) the job at replacing him. We didn't draft or sign a single competent G and instead just put a 2nd year UDFA with 10 career snaps of offensive experience as the starter.