There’s plenty of NFL news to get to, so let’s get to it in the Tuesday notes …
• When the news broke Sunday that Ja’Marr Chase and Tee Higgins were getting their outsized new contracts, a lot of faulty analysis followed.
So let’s play mythbuster here.
The first thing to emerge in almost any of these negotiations is the new-money average, which generally makes a deal look as big as possible. It’s not an unfair way of looking at a deal—by doing an extension early (like the Cincinnati Bengals did with Chase and Joe Burrow), the team is taking years of the deal and making them way more expensive, so the previous numbers have to be considered. In other words, of course, a guy who has $20 million sitting in an existing year is going to get more than a guy who has $500,000 sitting in the same year.
That said, it doesn’t make a ton of sense to add up the new-money averages for Burrow, Chase and Higgins, and say the three are at $124 million per year. Because that’s not what Cincinnati is dealing with. It’s the total of the deals, which adds up to about $110 million per year. It’s still a lot. But because these guys are homegrown, the numbers are a little more manageable, at around $36.7 million per player.
Then, there’s the idea that you can’t make it work elsewhere. We can, again, start with simple math here. The cap this year is $279.2 million. Last year it was $255.4 million, and the year before that it was at $224.8 million, meaning it’s trending to top $300 million in 2026. So there are team-building challenges ahead. But there’s also room to build.
And along those lines, and I brought this up with Conor Orr on The MMQB Podcast this week, where the Bengals are right now isn’t dissimilar from the spot the Indianapolis Colts were in when Hall of Fame GM Bill Polian was building around Peyton Manning in the 2000s. In fact, in their championship season of 2006, Manning, Marvin Harrison and Reggie Wayne had cap hits totaling $21.633 million, accounting for roughly 33% of their $66.239 million in salary cap spending that year, per the cap-tracking site Spotrac.
The cash those guys made further colors the example, with the three taking home $39.1 million, which totaled nearly 40% of the 2006 cap limit of $102 million. Remember, those Colts also had Dwight Freeney, Robert Mathis, Dallas Clark, Tarik Glenn Jr. and Jeff Saturday.
So how did Indy make it work? The Colts hired Tony Dungy in 2002, in part because they knew they were going to be top-heavy on the cap, and spending more on offense, knowing Dungy’s defensive scheme was simple, predicated on getting guys playing fast and, thus, more user-friendly for young defensive players playing on rookie contracts. So now, with this set up, Bengals GM Duke Tobin and his scouts will have to fill out the defense around the select few guys they pay (Logan Wilson and, for now, Trey Hendrickson).
One nice bonus is that their new coordinator hire, Al Golden, comes from Notre Dame, so he should have a really good handle on what guys in college are learning, and what they’re capable of, and, as such, have a grasp on how to use them early in their careers.
So in totality, do the big contracts create challenges? Sure.
But these are challenges a lot of teams would like to have.
• Arizona WR Tetairoa McMillan had his own personal pro day Monday, and it went as most teams expected. He is, of course, a physical specimen (he came in at 6'4" and 219 pounds in Indy), but he was always more of a contested-catch receiver than a separator, and that showed up in his 40 time in Tucson after he opted not to run in Indy.
He ran just one 40-yard dash, having been prodded by teams to do it. The range I heard from teams there was in the mid-to-high 4.5s. One team I talked to had him at 4.54. Another was at 4.55. A third had McMillan running 4.57. All these times are by handheld stopwatch, which is generally a tick-or-two faster than electronic timing, and they color why he chose not to run three weeks ago in Indy.
This also sets up an interesting circumstance going forward with the top receivers jockeying for position in the first round. McMillan, fair to say, went into the college season in pole position to be the first one taken. Matthew Golden has come hard around the corner into the final stretch. He transferred from Houston to Texas last year, had 58 catches for 987 yards and nine touchdowns in 2024, then blazed a 4.29 at the combine.
Ohio State’s hyper-productive Emeka Egbuka is also in that mix, and will run at his pro day in Columbus, having had less time to prepare for the combine since his last game was Jan. 20. And then there’s Missouri’s Luther Burden III, who, like McMillan, has some football-character questions that teams are working through.
To me, the interesting thing is this isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison. Golden and McMillan are different players. Egbuka is more of a slot receiver. Burden is probably best utilized as a bit of a gadget guy. So it might boil down to which type a team is looking for.
• Working on my Sam Darnold story last week, I did venture to ask the new
Seattle Seahawks quarterback what advice he’d give a younger quarterback going through what he did in washing out of his first team and bouncing around a bit. I really liked his answer.
“I think the biggest thing, especially as an early draft pick you might feel like you have all the answers, but this is what I did: I kept learning,” he said. “I kept learning every single day. Even with little successes in New York and even some of the mistakes I made in New York, I learned from them. I took the coaching and learned from it, and did the same thing in Carolina and so on and so on. The biggest thing is no matter what level you’re at, no matter where you get drafted, you’re always learning and you’re always growing as a quarterback.
“As long as you do that and keep your head down, I think another big thing is just staying humble in your work and keeping the work and the grind number one. People say, ‘Keeping the main thing the main thing.’ I think that’s huge. There’s so many different opportunities with social media and all these different people reaching out to you. Doing media, some guys can get lost in doing these things. Even after having a good season like I had last year, they start to speak pretty high of you. There are still doubters. At the end of the day, that doesn’t even matter. I just got to go out there and play it one play at a time and do my job every single play.
“If I just do that, the rest will take care of itself.”
• One leftover from my Seahawks reporting over the weekend—one reason for DK Metcalf’s departure was that he wanted to be paid now. And not now as in this offseason. Now as in right now in March.
The Seahawks typically do extensions with guys under contract in the summer. Maybe, if Metcalf was still around at that point, Seattle would’ve given him one. But the fact that he didn’t want to wait and see, which is understandable given that even a promise to negotiate wouldn’t guarantee anything, helped to drive the trade request.
With all that established, I think this was probably a case of that accelerating the inevitable conclusion, given that Metcalf and the team already endured some bumps (things weren’t always perfect between he and Geno Smith), and that Jaxon Smith-Njigba is among the young players poised to get new deals over the next year or so in Seattle.
• While we’re there, here, to me, is the dilemma for the Minnesota Vikings at quarterback—signing Aaron Rodgers might make sense given how close the team seems to be to a championship, but it would be materially different from the team’s efforts to hold on to Darnold or Daniel Jones (and they made an effort on both) over the past couple of weeks.
The reason is what it means for J.J. McCarthy.
Darnold likely would’ve come back as the starter, but one that would be pushed and perhaps eventually passed by McCarthy. Jones would’ve been thrown into a competition.
That, obviously, won’t be the case, if Rodgers becomes a Viking. Rather than creating high-end insurance against McCarthy for a team that won 14 games a year ago, Minnesota would essentially be pressing pause on the McCarthy era for a year. Are they willing to do that? Would McCarthy be on board with it? I think these are all fair questions to ask.
• Derek Stingley Jr.’s three-year, $90 million extension finally brings the market at corner up to the level where other premium positions are. And I think it’s a result of Jaycee Horn getting a deal at $24 million per year—as a guy who’s a really good player who hasn’t quite have lived up to his draft position (he’s not what the guy taken one pick behind him, Patrick Surtain II, has become).
And it’ll have a direct effect on two other guys, with the New York Jets and Kansas City Chiefs planning to extend Sauce Gardner and Trent McDuffie this offseason. Both of those guys have made All-Pro teams twice in their careers.
• Going through the real numbers, and I’ll say this—the Tennessee Titans’ deal with Dan Moore Jr. is very, very real. He’s due to make $50 million over the first two years of his four-year, $82 million contract. And $41.49 million is fully guaranteed at signing, with $510,000 in per-game roster bonus this year that can get him to $42 million at the end of the 2025 season, at which point he’ll have taken home $30 million in cash.
Bottom line: There’s no “up-to” in that $82 million. The Titans paid through the nose for a guy they hope can stabilize the left tackle spot, make the line better by pushing last year’s first-rounder, JC Latham, to right tackle, and was very well-liked in Pittsburgh. He’s not Trent Williams, but, the idea goes, he’s plenty good enough to help. And given the expenditure, he needs to be.
• Hidden in the mess of free agency news was how the Las Vegas Raiders took some chances on a few talented guys that have flashed—in safety Jeremy Chinn and corners Eric Stokes and Lonnie Johnson Jr.—on the bet that Pete Carroll will get the most from them. They’re fits, too. Both Stokes and Johnson are rangy, long corners, and it’s not too hard to envision Chinn playing the Kam Chancellor role in Carroll’s defense.
• Another sneaky smart investment, to me, was the Baltimore Ravens giving Cooper Rush a nice two-year deal. That, to me, gives the coaches some flexibility if Lamar Jackson is nicked up during the year. Yes, the medical decisions are largely up to the doctors. But if there’s a close one that could go either way, having Rush should give everyone confidence you can win a game while giving Jackson a week, should he need it, to heal. And not only does that help in the moment, it could also lead to having a fresher version of Jackson in the playoffs.
• As we’ve said the past few weeks, it sure feels like the consensus is coalescing that Cam Ward is the draft’s top quarterback. And I’d say there’s a very wide range of outcomes for the next one, presumably Shedeur Sanders, to go—I view him like I did Bo Nix last year, where fit will be important in determining how high he’s drafted.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Explaining the Real Math Behind the Bengals’ Expensive Receivers.