The Tee Higgins-shaped cloud that lingers over everything

NFL free agency lists are coming out as we ramp up for the offseason, and the dropoff from No. 1 to No. 2 in most of these lists is very noticeable. ESPN’s Matt Bowen wrote a list that starts with Higgins, places Chiefs G Trey Smith second, and has a suddenly rejuvenated Ravens LT Ronnie Stanley third.

I think free agency’s NFL reputation is bad for dumb reasons — you can find good players that help your team in free agency — it’s just that the top of the market is generally semi-stars that get paid like stars for their rarity. The NFL salary cap exists, but in non-Saints situations, it exists to make teams make a choice between their sixth- and seventh-best players. It isn’t much of a deterrent for keeping the band that you want to keep together in town. And thus generally the question with players that make it to free agency becomes: Why did a team let this guy go?

Tee Higgins, franchise tagged last year, comes into this offseason projected to be a free agent because the Bengals don’t pay anybody. OK, that’s not true, they paid Joe Burrow. But otherwise, the Bengals operate like they need every player to take a hometown discount to afford them. To wit, from this exclusive with de facto Bengals GM Duke Tobin:

Q: What are the chances you will be able to keep Ja’Marr Chase and Tee Higgins together?

Tobin: It's going to be hard. We feel like we have the resources to do it, but it all depends on how the negotiation goes and whether they're willing to accept wanting to come back at a number that makes sense for everybody. And you know what we do with Tee going forward, I've always been very upfront in my desire to have Tee Higgins on our team. I've never not been upfront about that, and that desire continues, but we have to be able to come together with his representation on what that means and what the right number is for his experience, for his play time, for his production. And let's find something that works for everybody, because he is a guy that we want to have here, and hopefully that can come together, but we have other guys who are trying to take big bites of the apple in other areas, and we're going to have to balance those as we go forward.

This is the kind of thing you say about a guy you don’t expect to keep. I’m sorry, but it is. The right number is what the market will bear. And, frankly, it’s kind of a shame. I can understand that the Bengals are annoyed that Higgins keeps missing games — he played 24 of 34 possible games in 2023 and 2024 — but I think of this kind of like I think of the Chiefs having to trade Tyreek Hill. It’s bad for the overall entertainment of the sport to break up Burrow, Ja’Marr Chase, and Higgins as a trio. Just as it was to separate Hill from Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce.

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What if I told you there were a way to rebuild a defense that didn’t cost money?

The main fact cited by Bengals beats about this offseason is a very obvious “this team needs to spend on defensive players” after the team’s defense was an abomination this past season. It was enough of an abomination that defensive coordinator Lou Anarumo — once ticketed for head-coaching interviews — was fired.

This has a shades of Bengals past bit to it because it reminds me so much of their offensive line slowly drying up when they missed on draft picks. Andrew Whitworth left the Bengals for the Rams because they were ready to hand over the position to Cedric Ogbuehi and Jake Fisher. It is a draft-and-development failure on a wide scale that players like Myles Murphy, Joseph Ossai, Kris Jenkins Jr., Dax Hill, Jordan Battle, and DJ Turner have not borne fruit yet. You can’t make players be ready, and you can’t wishcast your youth into being good. Speaking of that, what did Tobin say about 2024 third-round pick Jermaine Burton?

Q: What has Jermaine Burton done to deserve a spot on the roster?

Tobin: He's done nothing, and he's going to have to start doing something quickly. We knew we were taking a risk. We felt comfortable that we could help him through some of the challenges he's had in the past, and we're going to continue to try to help him. But this is professional football, and you have to take accountability, and you have to be accountable to your teammates, your coaches, and the team that you're playing for, and he has to figure that out. He's got to figure that out fast. He's a very talented player, and we knew that there were risks in taking him. We knew there were rewards in taking him. We know what both of those are. We're hoping for the rewards. We're giving him the resources he needs to get to those rewards, but at the end of the day, you can't want it more for somebody than they want it for themselves. And we're hoping that Jermaine figures that out.

Yikes. Good luck in the post-Tee era.

The thing is, the Bengals were … already spending a lot on their defense. Per Over The Cap, they spent $112 million in cap figure on their defense in 2024, fourth-most in the league. Here’s the funniest part of this: The Panthers spent $66.7 million on their defense in 2024, second-lowest in the league, and they played like trash. Every other team in the bottom eight in cap spending on defense got a good return on that: Lions, Dolphins, Eagles, Broncos, Vikings, Chiefs, Rams. Could you quibble that they had bad games here or there? Sure. Could you say that the Bengals are aspirationally trying to be one of these teams by draft spending? Sure. The thing is, several of those teams are better coached. Aaron Glenn was hired as Jets head coach. Every other team except the Eagles (because Fangio doesn’t seem to want to be a head coach again) and the Rams (I don’t get why Chris Shula was frozen out) had their defensive coaches interview or at least draw a team’s reported interest (Spagnuolo with the Raiders) for head-coaching positions this offseason.

Some teams are stuck with tough contract situations. The Bengals have $46.5 million in cap space before they lift a finger, can give Trey Hendrickson an extension to easily create more space, and can lop off Sheldon Rankins, Sam Hubbard, and Alex Cappa for nearly $27 million in savings. There’s really not an argument to be made that they can’t afford a Higgins extension and a defensive overhaul.

There’s also no reason to believe that any of these defensive free agents will change the entire calculus for the Bengals. Josh Sweat is a good edge rusher, and pairing him next to Hendrickson would give you some strong bookends in theory. But the depth of talent is what sunk the Bengals last year more than anything. They need upgrades everywhere. They’re not an Osa Odighizuwa or Milton Williams away from having a good defense.

Which I think goes back to coaching and floor-raising signings. The Chiefs and Broncos and Vikings all signed good defensive players, yes. They also drafted well (okay, not the Vikings), yes. But crucially they also have starters or key rotational players that did not cost a pretty penny. John Franklin-Myers played on a $5 million cap hit in 2024. Brandon Jones on a $3.3 million hit. P.J. Locke was exposed when the Broncos lost, but was a key starter who cost almost nothing. Tershawn Wharton was a UDFA. Stephon Gilmore was a one-year, $7 million bandaid signing. None of these guys are stars anymore, but good defenses aren’t built on stars-and-scrubs. Good defenses can account for just about anything.

The Bengals can’t undo their draft picks being bad to raise their ceiling. But their floor is a more important chase because if they had the 25th-best defense in the league instead of dead last, they’d have made the playoffs. And you can create a floor out of good blitzes, tactics, and solid players. (The Bengals could probably even afford to get a good EDGE and Higgins if they wanted to, but they won’t.)

The thing is, if you don’t have Higgins, the offensive floor is no longer good enough to claim you can do that. The more you make Burrow throw checkdowns to catch-and-fall tight ends, the more you reduce his super powers.

The unique opportunity offered by how dumb the franchise tag system is

Over the years, the idea has been that a second franchise tag would be so exorbitant that teams would mostly avoid paying it. That has been the case. Here’s the thing: A second Higgins tag of around $26 million (exact numbers not out yet) is … kind of a bargain.

Between the Justin Jefferson and CeeDee Lamb re-signings happening so late in the offseason and the skyrocketing salary cap due to the COVID-19 year, $26 million would pay Higgins on roughly the same average per year as DeVonta Smith or Cooper Kupp, and ahead of Nico Collins. He’d certainly get more guaranteed money on average, but you wouldn’t be responsible for the future of Higgins at all.

Would Higgins be pissed off? I would think so. Would he be pissed off enough to sit out games? That one I’m not buying based off his quotes in the press and how quickly he signed the tag last year. Perhaps I’m wrong about that, but it would take a lot for any football player to sit out games on purpose and go full Deshaun Watson. And we’re now in an era where Deshaun Watson failed so badly that it has put the scare into ownership groups.

At the very least the Bengals could tag-and-trade him for a good pick or a replacement piece, maybe both. But look at the quotes above. This doesn’t seem like a group that’s taking that scenario seriously.

Tying it all together

I’m no fan of the Bengals, but I am a fan of good offensive football. When the Bengals managed to come out of this past offseason with nothing for Higgins and nothing for Chase, I feared the worst. Chase is entering his fifth-year option season in 2025. Signing him to an extension would — surprise — be another way to open up cap space to keep Higgins.

This trio has given us a lot of fun football over the years. It gave us an unexpected Super Bowl run when the defense was right, and made it back to the AFC Championship the next year. It made the five-wins-in-a-row run it needed to compete for a playoff spot this year.

If you lose Higgins and piss off Joe Burrow in the process, the Bengals will go right back into the 2018-2019 memory hole. If you think the Bengals are just another franchise quarterback from being back to normal, folks, let me tell you about the Bengals I grew up with that were anchored to Jeff Blake and Akili Smith. The 1991-2002 Bengals were a .500 team exactly once. They had multiple four-year stretches where they didn’t even win seven games. Quarterback scouting has definitely gotten better, but it’s not hard to imagine a repeat of that scenario.

I can understand having some hesitation about paying an abstract Great No. 2 receiver who gets hurt a lot on a spreadsheet. For the Bengals, I’m worried letting Higgins walk would be, if not killing the golden goose, at least caging it and causing it a lot of distress.

Given this franchise already essentially killed Carson Palmer’s love of the game and made him ask for a trade, the broad direction here upsets me as a fan of the league.