{The Ultimate Bengals Offseason Extravaganza Thread}

[*TheLeonardLeap*]

(03-08-2025, 12:27 AM)ochocincos Wrote: He would lose a lot of money being tagged?
The tag is a lot.
If he's tagged a second time, it's even better.
He'd get an extra near $50+ mill if tagged twice.
And it would essentially be fully guaranteed without the Bengals having to put all that into escrow in 2025.

At the end of the day though, he technically doesn't have a choice.
Bengals don't HAVE to trade him this year.
They can choose to tag him next year, even twice if they wanted.
The only thing Hendrickson can choose to do is retire really, but that literally takes money off the table for him.
Given his age and position he plays, he can't take a year off refusing to play.

3yr/$90-100m extension > 2yr/~$50m of getting tagged twice

Plus the extension would come with a ~$20-30m signing bonus that he'd get right now and could invest and make money off of. Plus, again, potential possible future franchise tags are not guaranteed money until they're applied there is zero protection for him from a drop in production or a serious injury that would make the Bengals potentially not want to tag him again. There's a reason almost no player likes the tag and becomes disgruntled when they get it and almost all non-Bengals teams make sure that tagging a player is just a move to give them time to negotiate an extension that offseason rather than actually expecting them to play under the tag.

He does have a choice and it's not just retirement. He can just hold in and collect paychecks. He has a history of neck stingers, so he can just say that he tweaked it and doesn't feel right enough to practice soft tissue injuries are near impossible to disprove. Nobody around the NFL would blame him or find him less desirable because of it, because sacks are valuable and everyone is making fun of the Bengals for being a clown show organization right now and would understand.