The Athletic makes scathing case for Bengals to cut Joe Mixon

It is hard to argue with the numbers, no matter how you feel about Joe Mixon.

The Cincinnati Bengals are facing down a crucial offseason. When you have a quarterback like Joe Burrow, every offseason could be the difference between a championship and coming up short. That puts every decision under an even bigger magnifying glass than prior to his time here.

One of the more hotly debated decisions is running back Joe Mixon remaining on the team as the lead back and how much he is being paid. Last offseason, the running back restructured his contract and essentially took a pay cut in order to stay in Cincinnati. Now the subject is coming up again as he is set to have a $8.5 million cap hit.

The Athletic’s Paul Dehner Jr. put together several reasons why moving on from the veteran running back may be an obvious move. Even if there is a portion of the fan base that disagrees. One of the most egregious is the state of how the position is being paid.

The average cap hit for an NFL team’s entire running back room last year was $7.2 million. The Bengals ranked fifth at $11.7 million.

Dehner went on to say that out of the final 14 teams, only two of them had a cap hit over that average, and three of the teams that made it into Championship weekend had less than a $5.5 million cap hit assigned to the position.

Between Trayveon Williams, Chris Evans, and rookie Chase Brown last season, their cap hit was hardly over $3 million. Now none of them really put up the numbers that Mixon did. However, no one got close to the volume that he did either. That is part of another problem Dehner highlights. Cincinnati just isn’t getting enough of a return for the volume being put into Mixon.

To think the Bengals handed the ball to Mixon 237 times while in playoff contention last season and got back some of the least productive numbers in football exposes the issue…

…Chase Brown posted five touches (not counting Week 18) that gained at least 15 yards in just 46 opportunities. That’s one in every nine touches. In that span, Mixon posted 10 touches that gained at least 15 yards. That’s one in every 31 touches.

Brown is set to have a cap hit under $1 million in 2024 compared to Mixon having a cap hit over 800 percent of that value.

What Dehner’s piece really represents is that the Bengals are entering an era in which businesses really have to start outweighing feelings. In an offseason where it looks like the team will opt to tag Tee Higgins while letting long-time locker room leader Tyler Boyd walk in free agency, you have to start seriously weighing options at the running back position.

We may even have this same conversation next offseason with a tagged Higgins set to hit the open market. Can the team save a ton of cash/cap space by drafting a possible replacement (if Andrei Iosivas doesn’t develop into that)?

A rookie contract, compared to having two wide receivers with over 20 million and maybe even over 30 million AAV, is tough to fit under the cap without sacrificing somewhere else on the team. Cincinnati can do it, but is it a good business decision to field a well-rounded team that can win a ring?

Right now, tagging Higgins and having Ja’Marr Chase on the fifth-year option has a total cap hit of around $30 million. That is the kind of value this team needs to find to get over the hump. Doing that while overpaying Mixon really cancels itself out.

Mixon has entered a period of his career where it is hard to argue that he just isn’t the same player this team drafted. As Dehner notes, he has been one of the most successful running backs in the team’s history. That doesn’t help the team win a ring next season, though. That cap hit could go towards bringing in/retaining a player who provides serious positional value.

The reality is business decisions need to be made every offseason. It is hard to argue that the Bengals wouldn’t be better allocating that cap space elsewhere on the roster. That is a hard pill to swallow for a lot of fans, but it could represent a huge upshift in the offense’s running game.