For each of the past two seasons, Trey Hendrickson has rung up 17½ sacks – that figure a league-leading total during the 2024 NFL campaign.
For each of the past two offseasons, Trey Hendrickson has been the subject of trade rumors.
The problem should be as obvious to the Cincinnati Bengals as Hendrickson’s All-Pro production is to everyone else. This is a highly capable team (and player) which might have done significant damage in the playoffs earlier this year – had it been able to play a lick of defense collectively, Hendrickson’s sublime effort and performances notwithstanding, or figured out how to beat an eventual 4-13 team like the New England Patriots at Paycor Stadium.
Yet those are the types of failings that enable a largely loaded roster to beat the brakes off lesser competition in December even if it has almost no hope to survive into January’s postseason’s crucible – which pretty much encapsulated the 2024 Bengals. But make no mistake, they just might have given a flawed Kansas City Chiefs squad all it could handle with a Super Bowl berth on the line – just as Cincinnati did in the 2021 playoffs, when the Bengals won the AFC championship game at Arrowhead Stadium.
But now?
Acting like a mom-and-pop operation in one of the league’s smallest markets makes it tough to realize ultimate success in the NFL – where, for example, good organizations maneuver like Fortune 500 companies even if they’re based in tiny towns like, oh, Green Bay, Wisconsin.
However when it comes to player acquisition (and even retention), the Bengals typically proceed as if they’re subject to some 25% tariff in order to fish an accomplished or up-and-coming veteran out of the free agent pool, which they infrequently wade into. Ironically, Hendrickson was one of the rare ones they plucked out, snapping him up four years ago after his 2020 breakout performance with the New Orleans Saints, another club that struggles to navigate the league’s financial obstacles.
Cincinnati was already in a pickle of its own making before news surfaced Thursday that Hendrickson, who has 57 sacks and 169 pressures since landing on the banks of the Ohio River, was given permission to find a trade partner. Sure, the Bengals knew enough to sign quarterback Joe Burrow to a five-year, $275 million contract in 2023 before his price tag got ridiculously out of hand. Otherwise, they’ve been chasing serviceable O-linemen to protect him, have kicked the can down the road on wideout Tee Higgins twice – franchising him a second time Monday for $26.2 million – and failed to reach a multi-year extension with Ja’Marr Chase last year, a decided early season distraction. All Chase did was perform like the league’s best receiver – which he might very well be – in 2024, forcing team director of player personnel Duke Tobin to admit at the scouting combine that Chase will “end up being the No. 1 paid non-quarterback in the league. We’re there. Let’s get it done.’ (And the raise the Las Vegas Raiders just gave Maxx Crosby means that the annual compensation floor for Chase starts at $35.5 million.)
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Since last season ended, Burrow has publicly stumped for his club to keep its best players … and effectively bemoaned the fact that other ones (read: the Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles) don’t seem to have much trouble doing just that. But these are the Bengals, who are chasing positional pay scales just like the Dallas Cowboys do rather than getting ahead of them – even as Tobin publicly agrees with Burrow, his salty superstar.
‘I’m optimistic. I want deals done just like our quarterback wants deals done,’ Tobin said last week. ‘Everything he says, I agree with. I want them done. I want the best players available. And I also want to add more players to our team. Again, I don’t want to just pay more money for the same team we had last year. We have other needs and I want to go after those needs as well.’
Uh huh.
Back to Hendrickson, who eventually agreed to play last season for $15 million, a veritable bargain for Tobin and old school owner Mike Brown. Cincinnati is currently focused on trying to run it back offensively in 2025 after averaging 27.8 points per game last season – a figure that led to all of nine wins since they usually struggled to stop anyone on the other side of the ball. At the rate things are unfolding, they’ll have to score 37.8 per next season in order to go 6-11.
Why appease Hendrickson, their one shining defensive light on a 25th-ranked unit and a man with a relentless motor, when he somehow managed to rack up those 17½ sacks despite the constant double- and triple-teams, when (wait for it) the rest of his teammates combined for … 18½ sacks? Why pay him when the other starting defensive end, Sam Hubbard, just retired after seven seasons? Why worry about another trade request given starting linebacker (and tackling machine) Germaine Pratt issued one of his own last month?
(Full disclosure, I voted for Hendrickson for 2024 Defensive Player of the Year partially for his performance, partially because he did it with so little help. He finished second to Denver Broncos cornerback Patrick Surtain II.)
This is all taking place, incidentally, as the team onboards Al Golden as its new defensive coordinator. Yes, he has a wealth of coaching experience at the college and pro levels, but he’s never been an NFL DC.
Hendrickson, 30, is in the final year of his contract – one without remaining guarantees but set to pay the four-time Pro Bowler $16 million in 2025. Is that substantial money? Sure. But it also suggests, merely by comparing the dollars, that he’s 45% the player Crosby is, and that’s patently untrue. A two-year Band-Aid with coverage of, say, $65 million seems like a reasonable solution – especially if you defer some cash with a voidable year and/or accept Burrow’s standing offer to restructure his own pact … though, admittedly, those are basically anathema concepts in the Queen City, where Brown prefers to pay as he goes rather than run up interest payments on his salary cap credit card. He made an exception with the structuring of Burrow’s contract but hasn’t budged for Chase or Hendrickson or Higgins. Yet.
Cincinnati has big-time potential and big-time players like its core quartet of stars, who drove the 57-year-old franchise to the cusp of its first Super Bowl victory three years ago. But until the Bengals become big-time spenders – or, at minimum, more creative and flexible ones when they need to be – fat chance they’ll ever rule the NFL jungle.
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