Why leverage between Ja’Marr Chase and Bengals shifted with Justin Jefferson deal

With Justin Jefferson’s $35 million per year and $110 million in total guarantees, the wide receiver market didn’t just reset Monday morning, it was redefined.

Nobody benefited more from the new definition than Ja’Marr Chase.

“Hell yeah!” the Bengals receiver said with a laugh back in January when asked if he wanted to wait for Jefferson to sign a contract before doing his own.

He likely woke up spouting the same exclamation Monday.

With a giant contract keeping Jefferson in Minnesota through 2028, all eyes turn toward the Bengals’ approach to keeping their elite receiver with quarterback Joe Burrow.

The original thought was Chase would wait for the Jefferson deal and then, perhaps, top it.

“BREAK THE BANK,” Chase directed to Jefferson on Instagram, more invested than any of his former teammates’ millions of followers.

Did he ever? These deals are often jazzed up to look stronger than they are with fake money, early outs and soft guarantees. Not this. It was clear as day. The previous high mark for money fully guaranteed at signing for a receiver was $52 million for Tyreek Hill in Miami. Jefferson landed $89 million.

League sources said the $35 million average value didn’t come as a shock, but those guarantees were eye-opening.

The conversation can now start for Chase, but questions start being asked as well. Is he worth as much as Jefferson? When does it happen? Is there another move to wait on? Is this structure even possible in Cincinnati?

Money and expectations have changed over the last few months.

The summer of wide receiver deals hit like a waterpark wave pool. Seven extensions averaging at least $23 million per season for the position were signed one after the other. Only five such contracts existed before this year.

The rash of extensions felt like a race. The timing of many was outside of historical norms as was the cash.

All this changed the game. The deadline for WR deals wasn’t the start of the season, training camp or even the franchise tag extension deadline of mid-July. The deadline for teams was to jump into the financial water before the Vikings and Jefferson made the big splash.

Four of the seven highest-paid (AAV) non-quarterbacks are now wide receivers extended this offseason.

In the NFL, as in life, always follow the money. In doing so, the league sent a clear message: quarterbacks and elite receivers are the two most valuable assets on any team. Once you have those two pieces, you can always find a way to make the rest work well enough to contend for a championship. Nobody knows this better than the Bengals.

It’s easy to say the Bengals should have found a way to get an expected Chase extension done sooner and avoid this hefty market adjustment, but Chase wasn’t going to so much as look in their direction until Jefferson’s last pen stroke dried in Minnesota.

There was no reason. Let his buddy reset the market and assist his success, once more, just like at LSU.

This all fit into the Bengals’ approach with Tee Higgins and general unwillingness at this point to reach the levels he desires and deserves. That decision was complicated and came with Chase in mind.

Chase’s situation didn’t seem nearly as challenging to decipher. He wants to stay with Burrow (he’s stated as much this year), the Bengals want to keep him with their franchise QB and value him as the second-best player on their team. The price tag would be hefty, but so is the value in building around an elite QB-WR connection.

The contract would likely get done sometime in the summer of 2025 because that was when nearly all of these types of contracts had been done – until now.

The extensions for 2021 top-10 draft picks Jaylen Waddle and DeVonta Smith came before their fourth seasons. Since the 2011 CBA instituted a rookie wage scale, only one first-round receiver had signed an extension before his fourth season (Tavon Austin). Only 19 of 288 non-quarterback first-round picks had done the same.

Yet, throw in Lions offensive tackle Penei Sewell and you have three of the seven non-QBs in the top 10 from 2021 inking deals before Year 4. Adios, precedent. Welcome to the new age of the constantly spiking salary cap creating bargains for early extenders.

Could Chase join the precedent-breaking trio? Incidentally, while the Jefferson contract may have officially started the conversations it also shifted the leverage of patience back to the Bengals.

Nobody will touch that Jefferson number anytime soon, with the Cowboys’ CeeDee Lamb the only other major receiver left without a deal. The Bengals have Chase signed through the 2025 season with the fifth-year option next year at $21.9 million. The advantage to Chase signing now would be to lock in his guarantees before risking injury this year.

The Bengals can now sit back and play the long game to next summer.

Remember, Cincinnati did this with A.J. Green. He signed his extension on the day the team flew to Oakland for the season opener of his fifth-year option season in 2015.

Last offseason, they worked on a Burrow extension and didn’t finish it until the Chiefs and Lions kicked off for the opener.

Playing out the timeline fits the Bengals’ DNA as much as setting a value and refusing to move from it.

League sources indicated Chase signing before this season would likely mean his camp giving up more than a little in the negotiation.

Such isn’t to say the future of Burrow and Chase together is suddenly jeopardized. Hardly. They are the heartbeat of the Bengals’ championship dreams. Everyone knows this. Eventually, the deal should get done.

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The concern won’t be in the cost reaching near (or exceeding) $35 million per year, but what to make of those guarantees. The Bengals have notoriously never given high guarantees before Burrow. He was the exception. You can get away with that with a franchise-altering QB.

Going back and breaking their rules on guarantees with Chase would be the real problem. It could open Pandora’s Box for every great Bengals player to claim they deserve the big guaranteed money as well. Perhaps an argument could be made in viewing Burrow-Chase as a packaged exception to the rule from Day 1.

Yet, nobody would be surprised to see Bengals executive vice president Katie Blackburn and the family take a hard line on the guaranteed money with Chase and create the largest obstacle.

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It’s probably the one thing they can’t do with the Chase contract if they plan to continue doing business as they have for generations. Certainly, as it relates to the outlier of the Jefferson template.

There are creative ways around it, the Bengals have a lifetime of contracts to point at as examples. This will require the same.

The question to answer inside of the guarantees conversation is whether Chase deserves to equal Jefferson’s record-breaking deal.

Jefferson’s deal reached new heights because his production dictated it — and Minnesota had nobody else to pay upon ditching Kurt Cousins for rookie J.J. McCarthy.

Jefferson posted the most receiving yards through four seasons in NFL history (5,899), clearing second-place Michael Thomas by 377 yards.

Chase has 3,712 yards through his first three seasons and is unlikely to catch him.

If looking at receiving yards per game through the first four seasons by players with at least 3,500 yards, you end up with this list.

Of course, there could be one more season of data points to reference should this negotiation stretch into 2025. The Bengals brought in Justin Rascati from Minnesota as passing game coordinator under new offensive coordinator Dan Pitcher. There will be designs to find new methods of utilizing Chase in the same ways the Vikings featured Jefferson.

There’s still room for Chase — and his value — to grow in Cincinnati.

After Monday, the cost of doing elite receiver business in the NFL grew substantially. The next phase of Negotiating with the Stars can officially begin in Cincinnati.

(Photo: Jeff Dean / Getty Images)