Bengals won’t benefit from latest NFL news like virtually every other team will unless adaptation follows
The NFL salary cap continues to skyrocket, but the Bengals need to get off the ground first.
The NFL salary cap is going up, again, by a healthy amount.
NFL Media’s Tom Pelissero reports clubs were informed Friday afternoon the projected salary cap will land between $301.2 million and $305.7 million. The official amount will break the $300 million barrier that has never before been touched by the league.
In all likelihood, the final salary cap number will be about $303.5 million. That figure would grant the Cincinnati Bengals $54,937,024 in offseason cap space, according to Over The Cap, and would currently rank seventh in the league.
The cap going up is almost universally good news for clubs. It means there is an increase in flexibility to retain players, and sign new players.
Both those realities apply to the Bengals, but they won’t truly benefit from the added space relative to other teams if they fail to start operating like other teams.
An increase in the salary cap hurts the Bengals as much as it helps them
Allow me to steal a line I used in an article from last year: “Cash matters way more than cap. The Cincinnati Bengals happen to operate in a way that make both matter on a yearly basis.”
Players don’t get paid with cap space. They get paid with cash, and they become incentivized to sign contracts with cash earned at signing, aka a signing bonus, and cash that’s guaranteed to them beyond the first year. Both make up the umbrella term “guaranteed money” you see included with every major NFL contract agreement that comes across your timeline.
It’s no secret the Bengals are as opposed to guaranteed money as any team in professional sports. A detailed analysis from The Casual Bengal found the organization’s average external free-agent contract includes 31.2% guaranteed money since 2020, dead-last in NFL. The league average this decade is 49.9% since 2020. Ostensibly half of the average free-agent contract nowadays is guaranteed. Cincinnati still operates around the one-third mark.
Those figures are important to note because as the cap goes up, salaries go up, and guarantees follow. The Bengals are trying to keep up without guaranteeing too much of their offers. It’s a tough way to live when the goal is to attract players that actually increase the talent level of the roster. The better the player, the more you’ll have to guarantee their contract.
How the Bengals work around their low guarantees
Cincinnati marches on to the tune of its own beat with multi-year offers featuring qualities to counter low guarantees. Competitive signing bonuses, higher first-year salaries, and second-year roster bonuses have been commonalities in their notable contracts this decade. These offers end up looking rather front-loaded with a healthy portion of the deal being paid out before the player takes a snap in his second season.
Defensive tackle B.J. Hill’s three-year, $33 million contract he signed last March is a perfect example. Hill received one-third of his deal, $11 million, in his signing bonus, and the $5 million in cash he received from his base salary and bonuses netted him $16 million in 2025. 48.4% of his three-year deal was paid out in the first year, and outside of a $2 million roster bonus he’s due on Mar. 15 this year, there are no guarantees remaining in his contract.
Hill, of course, was an internal signing last year. Trey Hendrickson was an external signing back in 2021. He inked a four-year, $60 million deal featuring a $10 million signing bonus, and two $6 million roster bonuses that were paid in the first and second year. None of his base salaries were guaranteed, but since he was on the roster for the second year, he accrued $22 million in practical guarantees. That equates to 36.6% of the total deal.
This is the way the Bengals want to conduct business. By never offering external free agents future guaranteed salaries, they can essentially pay those players year-by-year without worrying about being locked into deals they may regret. It also ensures every year, no matter what, their cap health will be optimal. It worked from 2020-22 when they supplemented the roster with Hendrickson and several other quality free-agent additions, but the cap also dropped from $198 million in 2020 to $182 million in 2021 due to COVID-19. It rose back to $208 million in 2022, but a $10 million rise over two years is nothing compared to a ~$25 million jump in one year.
Thus, we’ve arrived at the crux of Cincinnati’s issue.
Front-loading deals is bad practice in a world where the cap always balloons
A pandemic caused the NFL to be cautious with money, and the salary cap dropped because of it. The cap has only gone up every other years in its existence, and since the league’s new $110 billion media deal began in 2023, it’s grown by an average of $23.33 million compared to the average yearly growth of $10.74 million from 2013-2020.
The cap’s growth is much larger than it used to be, and it keeps rising. Clubs expect the cap to go up by north of $20 million every year instead of the approximately $10 million in yearly growth it used to experience. They know the value of current cap space has changed, which is why more and more deals are back-loaded to account for inevitable cap growth.
The Bengals, on the other hand, haven’t made this shift. They won’t push cap dollars into the future because that would require guaranteeing future salaries. They could include larger future roster bonuses, ala the $10 million roster bonus wide receiver Tee Higgins is set to earn on Mar. 15, and the $5 million he can earn on Mar. 17, 2027, but that route isn’t always going to work with free agents who are new to the Bengals’ way of business.
By sticking to a front-loaded philosophy, Cincinnati isn’t taking advantage of the cap’s continual year-over-year growth like its competition has been doing for the last few years. The front office’s purchasing power dwindles as agents can command larger Average Annual Values (AAV) with the cap rising, and thus, larger guaranteed sums as well. This is why the Bengals were successful directly following COVID; the cap dropping not only hurt other teams that didn’t prioritize future cap health, it stagnated every positional market, and Cincy’s front-loaded offers were far more enticing than they are now.
What needs to happen
The Bengals either need to get with the times and push more cap dollars into the future, or they need to be perfect in identifying free agents who are still willing to accept front-loaded deals with minimal long-term security.
Defensive coordinator Al Golden is expected to see his defense benefit with the addition of a few free agents, and the fate of their 2026 season will heavily depend on how good those additions are.
Maybe Cincinnati hits it out the park like it did five years ago. The rest of the league, fully aware of the cap’s continual ascension into the stratosphere, won’t make it easy.