With the NFL franchise tag window opening Tuesday, the Bengals now have a big decision to make with Trey Hendrickson. After an offseason of drama in 2025, the two sides could be headed down the same path in 2026.

Last year, Hendrickson sat out most of training camp while trying to secure a new deal from the Bengals. The 31-year-old didn’t land a long-term contract, but he did score a $13 million raise for 2025. His contract is now expiring, which means he’s headed for free agency — unless, of course, the Bengals hit him with the franchise tag.

The Bengals essentially have three options this offseason when it comes to Hendrickson’s future, so let’s take a look at what they might do.

Hit him with the franchise tag

When Hendrickson received a raise last season, it would have made sense for him to ask for a no-tag clause, but that didn’t happen, which means the Bengals can use the tag this year. Although the defensive end tag is expected to be about $27.2 million, Hendrickson will get more than that because players receive either the tag number or a 20% bump from their prior salary. A 20% bump would put his tag figure closer to $30.2 million.

The Bengals had one of the NFL’s worst defenses last year, and one thing they could absolutely use is pass-rushing help. If they tag Hendrickson, they’d keep a top-tier pass rusher at a bargain rate. Although Hendrickson is 31, his age wouldn’t be a major factor here because the commitment would be for just one season. If he had a big year in 2026, the Bengals could tag him again at a cost of $36.24 million. That would put him under team control for two years at $66.24 million total, with only $30.2 million guaranteed.

Hendrickson played just seven games last season due to injury, so there is an injury concern. But again, if injuries resurfaced in 2026, the Bengals could simply let him walk in 2027.

The downside is that the Bengals and Hendrickson don’t appear to be on great terms. If he were tagged, both sides would have until mid-July to work out a long-term deal. If they couldn’t reach one last offseason, it’s unlikely they would this year, especially with Hendrickson a year older. A tag could set up another training camp holdout … unless the Bengals tag him with another plan in mind, which takes us to our next option.

Ranking the top 50 NFL free agents: Early look at the stars who could hit the market in March

Garrett Podell

Tag-and-trade

This isn’t something you see in the NFL very often, but definitely does happen. The Bengals could tag Hendrickson and then shop him. For Cincinnati, this would be the best-case scenario. Yes, they’d lose him, but they’d likely land one or two draft picks they could use to rebuild their defense.

They’d need a trade partner, but that shouldn’t be difficult. Nearly every team is looking to improve its pass rush, and the NFL Scouting Combine falls within the two-week tag window. That gives the Bengals a chance to gauge Hendrickson’s market in Indianapolis before the window closes March 3. They also wouldn’t have to trade him immediately; they could wait for the best offer.

A notable recent tag-and-trade came in 2022 when the Packers tagged Davante Adams, who definitely did NOT want to be tagged. Less than 10 days later, he was traded to Las Vegas. Defensively, tagged-and-traded players in recent years include Chandler Jones (2022), Frank Clark (2019) and Dee Ford (2019).

Although I think this makes a lot of sense for the Bengals, Pete Prisco doesn’t agree. 

“That’s always risky if you try and do that because you could get stuck with him,” Prisco said Tuesday on CBS Sports HQ. 

The Bengals might not get ideal compensation, but it’s highly unlikely they’d get stuck. In a worst-case scenario, they’d accept the best available offer, even if they didn’t love it.

Cincinnati’s front office isn’t known for aggressive moves like this, but it also wasn’t known for in-season trades — and it pulled off a notable one in October when it acquired Joe Flacco. Basically, don’t rule this out.

Let him walk

If the Bengals want a drama-free offseason, this is the simplest solution. Instead of tagging Hendrickson, they’d let him leave in free agency. Using the tag would immediately eat up $30.2 million in cap space, a massive number for a team with a ton of holes to fill in free agency, especially on defense.

The upside of letting him walk is financial flexibility. The downside is getting nothing in return. Hendrickson led the NFL in sacks in 2024, and pass rushers are always in demand. Letting him leave empty-handed wouldn’t be ideal, but it would allow both sides to move on immediately. (The Bengals could potentially receive a compensatory pick if Hendrickson signed with another team, but that would depend on several factors.)

Possible landing spots

If Hendrickson reaches free agency or gets traded, he’ll be with a new team in 2026. So where could he land?

The best landing spot might be just 115 miles west of Cincinnati. The Colts need pass-rush help, and a move would reunite Hendrickson with former Bengals defensive coordinator Lou Anarumo, now the Colts’ DC. After signing with the Bengals in 2021, Hendrickson blossomed under Anarumo, recording at least 14 sacks in three of four seasons — including 17.5 in both 2023 and 2024.

The 49ers finished with the NFL’s fewest sacks last year (20), and they need to do anything they can to get some help in the pass-rushing department.

The Patriots made a big splash in free agency last offseason, and with a healthy amount of salary cap space, it wouldn’t be surprising if they get aggressive again this year. The Patriots actually posted the league’s worst sack differential last year, allowing 48 while recording 35. Mike Vrabel will be looking for pass-rush upgrades.

The Titans have more cap space than anyone. If Hendrickson chases the biggest paycheck, this fit makes sense. And let’s not forget: Robert Saleh is a defensive coach, so he’ll certainly be looking for some game wreckers on that side of the ball.

For any team that might be interested in Hendrickson, Prisco did issue a stern warning.

“Here’s the problem with Trey Hendrickson: Injury and age,” Prisco said. “You’re talking about a guy who missed time last year and you’re also talking about a guy who’s 31 years old, but the allure and attraction of a pass-rusher like him will set the market for him.” 

Despite missing 10 games last season, Prisco still expects the 2024 sack leader to garner significant interest.

I think there’s going to be teams interested in adding him. There’s going to be a lot of teams who are pass-rush needy. All you have to do is go back to the last two Super Bowls and who won them: Well, the Eagles, they could rush the passer. The Seattle Seahawks, they could rush the passer. A lot of teams need that guy. 

He’s going to have a big market even though he’s 31. I think there will be caution involved with the contract. You can’t give him a megadeal because of the age, but he’s going to get some kind of deal, probably a three-year deal, that’s going to see him end up with some team that needs pass-rush help.

Right now, the Bengals hold all the leverage. If Hendrickson hits free agency, he’ll have a market — but there’s no guarantee he gets there since Cincinnati can simply tag him. This will be an interesting situation to watch over the next few weeks.

When the UEFA Champions League playoff round kicks off this week, there will be only one Premier League team competing. Newcastle United travel to Baku on Wednesday to take on the reigning Azerbaijani champs, Qarabag FK.

For almost everyone, reaching the playoff round is a success. The defending champs of both the Eredivisie and Serie A didn’t make the playoffs — they were eliminated from the league phase, as were two clubs from LaLiga, another Dutch club, a German club, and a French club. Both finalists from last year’s Champions League, Inter Milan and Paris Saint-Germain, didn’t do well enough in the league phase to skip straight ahead to the round of 16, so they are in the playoffs, and so too are Real Madrid, Atlético Madrid, Borussia Dortmund, and Juventus.

The purpose of the league phase is primarily to avoid elimination — unless you play in the Premier League.

Arsenal finished first in the league phase of the Champions League, winning eight of eight matches. Liverpool finished third, Tottenham Hotspur fourth, Chelsea sixth, and Manchester City eighth. Put another way, here’s where the eight clubs who earned a bye to the round of 16 come from:

• Germany: 1
• Spain: 1
• Portugal: 1
• England: 5

What’s even more striking: four of the five Premier League sides to finish in the top eight averaged more points per game in the Champions League than they do in their domestic league. Liverpool are sixth in England, third in Europe. Tottenham just fired their manager, they’re five points clear of the relegation places in England, and they finished fourth in the first stage of the tournament that theoretically features all of the best teams in the world.

It almost seems like the Champions League is easier for English teams than the Premier League — and that’s because it is. Here are the five main reasons.

– Premier League superlatives: 25 best/worst players at different skills
– Which clubs sign the best players for each position and why?
– Premier League’s 50 worst transfers of all time: Who is No. 1?

1. Premier League teams are richer than most of the teams in the Champions League

A couple of weeks ago, Deloitte released their Money League, which ranks the 30 richest soccer clubs in the world by revenue. Here’s how many clubs each country had on the list:

• Portugal: 1
• France: 1
• Turkey: 2
• Spain: 3
• Italy: 4
• Germany: 4
• England: 15

The Premier League has the richest broadcasting deals — by far — and it has more equitably distributed those revenues from top to bottom than any of the other Big Five leagues in Europe. The result is what you see above.

Now, revenue doesn’t have a one-to-one correlation with success — West Ham United are 20th in the Money League, for example — but on a broad scale and over a long enough time frame, the richest teams are going to be the best teams for obvious reasons.

2. Premier League teams have more talent than most of the teams in the Champions League

While reliable wage data is hard to come by, studies have shown that the estimated squad transfer values from Transfermarkt are a pretty solid proxy for how much a team pays its players. And how much a team pays its players is a pretty reliable proxy for how talented those players are, too.

Here’s how the top 25 teams in estimated market value distribute across the world’s soccer leagues:

• France: 1
• Portugal: 2
• Italy: 3
• Spain: 3
• Germany: 3
• England: 13

And as I wrote about last month when trying to explain the parity in the Premier League this season:

“Per analysis by Futi’s John Muller, the Big Six employed 29% of Transfermarkt’s estimated 300 most valuable players in the world back during the 2014-15 season, while just 7% were employed by other teams in England and 64% played elsewhere in Europe. Fast forward 10 years, and the Big Six’s share of the world’s best players has remained stable at 29%, but the rest of the Premier League’s hold on top talent has nearly tripled: up to 18%.“

Most of the best soccer players in the world are playing in the Premier League — and a lot of them aren’t playing in the Champions League.

3. Premier League teams are better than most of the teams in the Champions League

The Club Elo ratings have data that goes as far back as the 1920s, and the system is a simple historical record: two teams play, and rating points get awarded or subtracted based on the location of the match and the final score.

The current Elo rankings line up quite closely with the Transfermarkt estimations — even though the rankings don’t care about how much a team pays its players or how good we think they are. The purely result-based rankings divvy up the top 25 spots by league as such:

• France: 1
• Portugal: 2
• Spain: 3
• Germany: 3
• Italy: 4
• England: 12

While Elo is more of a backward-looking model, we can also use the betting markets to see how we might project team strength going forward. There are people whose financial livelihoods depend on estimating how good a given soccer team is compared to all of the other soccer teams, and the site PitchRank cross-references weekly betting odds to tell us what those people think.

Bayer Leverkusen are the eighth-highest seeded team among the 16 Champions League playoff clubs — right around average. At PitchRank, there are 11 Premier League teams rated higher than Leverkusen. If we take Benfica, the lowest-seeded team remaining in the Champions League, then there are 16 Premier League sides rated higher.

If there were a 36-team competition that included the best teams in the world, regardless of what league they play in, then close to half of them might come from the Premier League.

4. Premier League teams get easier schedules than all of the other Champions League teams

If we use the Club Elo ratings as a rough estimation of team strength, then here’s how the Premier League sides all rate out compared to everyone else in the Champions League:

• Arsenal: 1st
• Manchester City: 2nd
• Liverpool: 5th
• Chelsea: 8th
• Newcastle: 10th
• Tottenham: 16th

Per UEFA rules, teams from the same country can’t play each other in the league phase of the Champions League. So, Tottenham, for example, can’t draw five of the top 10 teams in the tournament. And sure enough: Opta’s strength-of-schedule rating says that Spurs had the easiest draw of any team. The same ratings say Liverpool had the fourth-easiest schedule, Chelsea the fifth easiest, and Man City the seventh easiest.

This doesn’t mean that Premier League teams can’t have tough draws — Arsenal’s was roughly average in difficulty, while Newcastle’s was among the five hardest — but instead it means that, on average, Premier League teams are going to have easier draws than teams from any other big league.

Of course, there’s a bit of circular logic at play here in terms of league-strength arguments: Premier League teams get easy schedules! But Premier League teams only have easy schedules because they don’t have to play other Premier League teams!

But this is why the top-eight numbers look so stark: Premier League teams are already way better, on average, than teams in any other league. And then the Premier League teams in the Champions League get to play against easier schedules, on average, than anyone else.

5. The Premier League is more physically demanding than the Champions League

Before Newcastle’s final league-phase match against PSG, Anthony Gordon was asked about the difference between playing in the Premier League and the Champions League.

“In the Champions League, teams are much more open,” he said. “They all try and play. It’s less transitional. In the Premier League, it’s become more physical than I’ve ever known it to be. It’s like a basketball game at times. It’s so relentless, physically. There’s not much control; it’s a running game. It’s about duels — who wins the duels wins the game.

“The Champions League is a bit more of an older style of game. It’s a bit more football-based. Teams come and try and play proper football. In the Premier League now you’re seeing a lot more throw-ins, set pieces. It’s become a lot slower and more set piece-based.”

There are two obvious ways we can support this with some evidence. The first is just by looking at the number of long throw-ins per game — both in the Champions League and in the Premier League this year and last year.

In the Premier League last season, per Gradient Sports data, the average game featured 1.22 long throws. And that’s basically what we’ve seen in the Champions League so far, about 1.23 per game. But in the Premier League this year? Teams are combining for 3.59 long throws per game. That’s a massive year-over-year change.

In a recent study on the set piece revolution in England, the analyst Michael Caley found that Premier League teams are launching 45% of their throw-ins from attacking areas into the box, while the average over the previous four seasons was just 17%.

Similarly, there is an increased emphasis on just fighting for balls in the air — or, as Gordon put it, duels. When he says teams in Europe “try and play football,” he means that they try to work the ball upfield through passing combinations on the ground. In the Premier League this year, much of what happens on the field is determined by who gets to a ball in the air first — or who gets to the ball after someone else gets to the ball in the air.

In England, teams are combining to attempt 110 aerial challenges per game this season. That’s up massively from last season’s numbers — 86.6 per game — and an even bigger departure from what we see in the Champions League: 77.3 per game.

Sure enough, there were four teams in the Champions League league phase with a set piece expected goal differential of plus-2 or better — and they all came from the Premier League. In fact, all six Premier League teams rated in the top 10 for set piece performance:

Perhaps there’s no better example of how different things are in the Premier League and the Champions League than the team that won the Premier League last season.

As you can see above, Liverpool were a dominant set piece force in the Champions League league phase. But in the Premier League, well, not so much:

Put more simply, Liverpool led the Champions League with a plus-8 goal differential from set pieces — and they’re second-to-last in the Premier League with a minus-6 goal differential from set pieces. Not only can Liverpool dominate the less physical opponents of Europe with set pieces, but they’re also able to play the football that Gordon refers to on top of it. In England, they’re completing 86.3% of their passes outside of the attacking third, while in Europe that number is all the way up at 90%.

The financial and tactical trends of world soccer, then, have converged in a way that exacerbates an already large gap between the best teams in Europe’s best leagues.

While, in the past, it was true that Premier League teams were more physical than teams in other leagues, those other leagues had their own kind of technical, tactical and skill-based advantages. But now Premier League teams are pulling the most valuable strategic lever (set pieces) way more aggressively than the rest of the world, their players are much more physical, and since the teams have so much money now, their players are as skilled if not more skilled than the players in every other league, too. Throw in the rule-based quirk that prevents them from playing each other, and you get five Premier League teams automatically qualifying for the Round of 16.

And as for the one team stuck in the playoff? Remember that set piece chart from the Champions League, the one where Newcastle ranked fourth behind Liverpool, Arsenal, and Chelsea? If we expanded it out to all 36 teams in the league phase, Qarabag would be dead last.

You can guess what’s going to happen over their next two matches. It’ll probably look a lot like what happened over the first eight.