Clock has begun for Bengals to extend wide receivers Ja’Marr Chase and Tee Higgins

Now that the regular season is over, Mike Brown can pay for his mistake of not extending Ja’Marr Chase before the season.

The offseason is now here for the Cincinnati Bengals, and it’s one that will go a long way in defining the rest of the Joe Burrow era.

The two biggest priorities for Cincinnati are locking up wide receivers Ja’Marr Chase and Tee Higgins long-term via an extension for Chase and a new deal for Higgins after playing on the franchise tag. Both players can be signed to new deals at any time now.

Let’s talk about Higgins first. As soon as a deal wasn’t done prior to the season most fans lost any hope at a long-term deal for Higgins with the Bengals, so why is he included in this? A few reasons.

The chief among them was Burrow himself putting pressure on the Bengals to get a deal done during press conferences as the season was ending. Cincinnati can choose to ignore that, but you don’t want to see another Carson Palmer situation with Burrow.

Why is there actually slight hope of it being pulled off? Higgins has parted ways with his previous agent — David Mulugheta — who is infamous among Bengals fans for not playing ball with the archaic ways Cincinnati extends players (structure of guaranteed money). He was the same agent who represented safety Jessie Bates.

Higgins has also made comments implying getting top wide receiver money isn’t as important to him as the situation he is joining. Expecting Higgins to take less is unfair to him. If he wants to stay in Cincinnati, though, he wouldn’t be joining for the same rate he could get on the open market.

Now, as far as Chase goes, he said he didn’t want to negotiate during the season after an offseason saga of him holding in looking for an extension after playing on his rookie deal for three years.

The Bengals really fumbled the situation as whatever he was looking for before the season won’t be nearly as cheap as he could command following a season where he led the league in receptions, receiving yards, and receiving touchdowns. They might as well get ready for a record-breaking deal since there is no way Burrow will stand for allowing Chase to eventually walk in free agency.

Maybe this whole Chase ordeal and ultimately having to pay him a lot more than had the Bengals got a deal done already will pull them out of their archaic ways since it’s going to hit their pocketbooks, and we know they don’t like that at all.

Getting these deals done will be even more important as the young receivers the Bengals have set up to take over have not taken the necessary steps to provide the confidence they will be able to properly open things up.

Andrei Iosivas is the best among them, but he hasn’t shown enough athleticism to eventually be WR2 like maybe was planned. He is a quality third or fourth wide receiver, but he has had issues consistently getting open and with cases of the drops.

Charlie Jones hasn’t shown much due to injuries, and Jermaine Burton hasn’t proven to be mature enough that they can count on him to even make the roster next season.

That makes locking up the best receiver combination in the NFL even that much more important for this team.