It’s time to pay the piper for Cincinnati Bengals owner Mike Brown. It’s not something he’s seemingly had to do very often throughout his tenure overseeing the team, considering they haven’t been among the most successful teams in the league at drafting and developing star talents. But they are at a high point in their history—with young talent ready to cash in.
And from the sounds of it, Brown is acutely aware of the fact that he may not be able to pay all of them what they want—or if he manages to do so, it will come at great expense elsewhere. Right now the Bengals’ nucleus surrounds QB Joe Burrow and WRs Tee Higgins and Ja’Marr Chase. The former two are due for extensions now.
Brown was asked about this current situation and how he can get everybody paid and he brought up the standard pie analogy when it comes to the salary cap. “It’s almost impossible to get everybody to think they got the piece they wanted”, he told Joe Danneman for FOX19 Now in Cincinnati.
“It’s hard to fit everybody in. It’s impossible to fit everybody in at the rate at which they could be paid. So you lose some guys. Every year there’s attrition. You try to work around it, and we’ve done that for a few years now”.
Both Burrow and Higgins were drafted in 2020, the former a first-round pick, but as a quarterback, they usually get paid after Year Three even as first-rounders in spite of the fifth-year option. There have been reports that the Bengals are ready to pay him, but both Burrow’s camp and that of Justin Herbert in Los Angeles are playing chicken, each wanting the other to do a deal first.
As for Higgins, that gets a lot more complicated, because Burrow and Chase (no sooner than in 2024, possibly even in 2025) are the guys that you have to pay. So do you try to find a way to get Higgins paid as either an elite number two receiver or otherwise a 1B? Because there’s no denying he’s extremely talented, and even better with Chase opposite him.
“It’s pretty obvious that Joe is the heart of the matter”, Brown said in speaking into reality the very obvious fact that the quarterback takes precedent. “After that, we want all the guys we can get, but we may have to go short in a couple cases”.
Will Higgins be the one on whom they go short? Over three seasons, he has caught 215 passes for 3,028 yards with 19 touchdowns and has done so very consistently with even production year in and year out. He would certainly be the best wide receiver on many rosters around the league, if not most rosters—probably in the rest of the AFC North, anyway.
One factor Brown has to weigh is the matter of escrow, as CBA rules stipulate that nearly all money guaranteed to players in a contract must be placed in an escrow account at signing. It’s an antiquated protection policy that owners now use as cudgels against doling out large guaranteed sums when once it was meant to serve as protection for players against league or team failure.
That escrow account will already be huge with Burrow’s deal, and eventually Chase’s. Adding in money for Higgins on top of that won’t be easy, even if it is doable.
