Another quiet NFL Sunday night has suddenly gotten loud.
The Bengals have finalized new deals for receivers Ja’Marr Chase and Tee Higgins. The news was delivered “exclusively” (or, more accurately, preliminary) to Jordan Schultz of Fox before it was distributed to other reporters. Both receivers have confirmed the development via the handshake emoji on Twitter.
Chase reportedly will get a four-year, $161 million deal. Although this part is (deliberately) vague, it would be a shock if it’s a straight four-year deal and not a four-year extension to the final year of his rookie contract, which was due to pay $21.8 million.
That makes the new-money average of $40.25 million an actual value at signing of $32.56 million. (And if it were a straight four-year, $161 million deal, it would have been presented as a three-year extension with a new-money average of $46.4 million.)
For Higgins, it’s a four-year, $115 million deal, with an average at signing of $28.75 million. To get that contract, he traded in $26.16 million in fully guaranteed pay for 2025 under the franchise tag and a straight-line shot at the open market in 2026, since the Bengals wouldn’t have tagged him a third time.
Higgins reportedly gets the first two years of the deal guaranteed; presumably, those years are fully guaranteed. Otherwise, it would have made no sense for him to give up the $26.16 million fully-guaranteed bird in hand.
We’ll get the full contracts and break them down as soon as they’re available. The bottom line is that two of the team’s key players are under contract for the foreseeable future — Chase for five years, and Higgins for four.
And the Bengals won’t have to worry, at least in the short term, about franchise quarterback Joe Burrow being upset with the failure to break the piggy bank for players who deserve to be paid commensurately with their skills.
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