Many Cincinnati Bengals fans have called out the front office’s inactivity past their initial wave of moves.
However, dissenters will often point to how unpredictable free agents can be when brought in from other teams, or the need to keep a healthy cap. To make more moves, the team could easily restructure quarterback Joe Burrow’s contract to push his cap hit down the road. That can create problems down the road if you don’t keep kicking it down the line.
ESPN’s Bill Barnwell recently did a deep dive
on how effective big free agents usually are for their new teams. We are going to talk about this excerpt here, but the whole article is well worth your time and very informative.
To summarize a bit. He ranked free agents with a numerical value between 0 (the worst) and 6 (the best), factoring in things like how well they played, how long they played, and how important they were to their new teams. (Again, I am summarizing)
How often do top free agents actually pan out?
Not as often as teams would like. The average grade for these 500 free agents [Top 50 from each season the past 10 years based on AAV] landed at 2.26 — closer to disappointing than average. Most players were either below average or lived up to expectations, but there were far more utter disasters than stunning breakouts, which makes sense; if a player’s already being paid market value or better to start, it’s going to be easier for them to come up short via injury or inconsistency than exceed expectations to play at a Pro Bowl-or-better level. And the vast majority of Pro Bowl-caliber talents never hit the open market.
This is certainly something a frugal team will point to in order to support their process. And it is fair that top free agents can be inconsistent. Usually the player is going into a very different situation than the one they were just successful in or get injured.
The Bengals could still certainly afford be much more active in the second or third wave of free agency based on all the needs they still have. But the guys they picked up early on certainly look like they’ll hopefully pan out for their needs.
