Grading the Dexter Lawrence trade ?

A long, detailed (and free) article from Paul Dehner & The Athletic explaining how the Lawrence trade came to be:

CINCINNATI — The Cincinnati Bengals weren’t spending more money.

Free agency ended. The cash was allocated. In the mind of the front office, all eyes turned to the draft.

“Completely locked down,” assistant general manager Steven Radicevic said. “We were done.”

Then, on April 6, defensive tackle Dexter Lawrence went public asking for a trade from the New York Giants, and the tone of the conversation — and public perception of what Bengals ownership is capable of doing — changed forever.

Cincinnati trading the 10th pick for Lawrence took a complicated, winding path through multiple meetings per day, draft simulations, phone calls with agents, conversations with the Giants and a unanimous agreement about a potential end result.

All those texts, calls and meetings kept ending up at one spot: Would executive vice president Katie Blackburn and Bengals ownership be willing and able to go places they’d never gone before to make the money work?

“The star of the show is Katie and she was able to fit it all together,” de facto GM Duke Tobin said.

A path that started with a meeting ended with the Bengals shocking the NFL world and finding a 340-pound exception to their financial philosophy.

“In terms of where we are with the cap,” Radicevic said, “I’ve never been in that situation since I’ve been here.”

This month wasn’t the first time the Bengals made calls checking on Lawrence’s availability.

A player they loved coming out of Clemson and feared lining up against for the Giants long represented a dream target worthy of a call.

The answer was always the same.

“We just had the door shut on us with it,” Radicevic said.

The first week of April, with Lawrence’s public trade request, the time came to check in once more.

The door opened.

“We’ve been in the situation here when we have players request a trade and most of the time they are just saying it,” Radicevic said. “You never know what is real and what’s not. They were obviously open to it, especially with what we were going to give up. That’s really when it started to gain traction.”

The Bengals weren’t new to the idea of a big splash this offseason. They were in the mix of a Maxx Crosby trade before a pivot to sign Boye Mafe, Bryan Cook and Jonathan Allen in the first wave of free agency for a combined eight years and $126 million.

Making calls and being in a trade conversation weren’t rare for the Bengals, despite public perception.

“We consider trades every year with most teams, because teams are calling around,” Tobin said. “Do you have interest? What would be the level you would be looking for? The reason that more of them don’t happen is that the need and the compensation and the cap situation don’t all align.”

For the Bengals, they almost never do.

The last time Cincinnati made a trade involving first-round draft capital for a player was moving back nine spots in the 2018 draft with the Bills in exchange for offensive tackle Cordy Glenn. They’d never traded a top-10 pick for a player in their history and hadn’t moved up in the first round since 1995.

“I don’t give up the 10th pick in the draft,” Tobin said.

This opportunity seemed different, potentially, from the beginning. At the very least, the immediate reaction didn’t require much selling to the family ownership of president Mike Brown and executives Troy and Katie Blackburn, Paul Brown, as well as Caroline and Elizabeth Blackburn.

“Commitment is the first thing,” Tobin said. “We got together and met, and there was firm commitment to ‘let’s see where this goes.'”

Yes, they’d put spending on veterans largely in the rearview mirror for the time being, with extension negotiations on the docket for significant outlays before the season kicks off.

Expecting Lawrence or a similar player to become available was not the plan when plotting options in January.

“You can’t put that together at the onset,” Tobin said. “You have to be able to adapt and be flexible. And that’s what we were when the Dexter thing came upon us. The opportunity to do that, we had to be flexible because it was something that was meaningful for our football team and would elevate us all.”

This truly would be about the money. Certainly, any conversation with the coaching staff about what an elevation would look like lasted about as long as a Sexy Dexy celebration.

“I think they knew as soon as it was an option that as a coaching staff, we’re about it,” head coach Zac Taylor said. “There’s no question needed of us. And everybody was on the same page.”

With everyone on the same page, the meeting frequency picked up. The personnel department, coaches and front office were already in daily draft meetings. Many of them would end with the smaller group of execs walking down the hall to meet with ownership for the latest Lawrence update.

Any small movement on the topic would bring the group together.

“Not even daily, we would talk in the morning on it, then if I had talked to somebody, we’d meet in the afternoon,” Radicevic said. “Felt like maybe it was gaining momentum, then we would talk more on it. We all just needed to make sure we were aligned on it.”

Cincinnati Bengals assistant general manager Steven Radicevic said the Bengals had checked on Dexter Lawrence’s availability in the past, but “we just had the door shut on us with it.

They were aligned at every step. Pieces were starting to fall into place.

“Once it became … a reality (that) something could come together, the meetings on it became more regular and more frequent,” assistant general manager Mike Potts said. “The talks heated up. Everything got more serious.”

• Commitment? Check.
• Alignment? Check.
• Giants’ interest? Check.
• Excitement? Not just yet.

“We’ve had hundreds of these types of talks,” Potts said. “Some of them don’t get past the early stages. Some get very close to the finish line and don’t quite get across the finish line. I’ve seen it happen before. I’ve known not to get too excited.”

The obvious obstacle still stood in the way.

“There were so many different layers and parts with this,” Radicevic said. “Can we make it fit?”

Time became a factor as the draft approached.

When terms of a potential trade came into focus, the idea of waiting until draft night to see who remained available at No. 10 was a non-starter.

There was talk about moving back in the first round, but teams weren’t willing to move up days before they knew what player they would be moving up to get. They’d even talked about moving up in the first round for a premium defender.

Eventually, the idea of the negotiation and taking a physical being part of finalizing the deal that couldn’t happen instantly, the Bengals and Giants were ready to move as the weekend before the draft came.

“It obviously wasn’t something we were going to be able to do on the clock,” Radicevic said. “We’ve been talking to the Giants for some time now and it was a process. You had to get there with the compensation in terms of what they were looking for. That was the first step.”

Once given permission from the Giants to discuss a contract extension with Lawrence’s agent, Joel Segal, that’s when making the money fit represented the final 10 percent that often dooms these deals. They had to pin down their asking prices.

“Is it something to: where they would have flexibility? Are they looking for Chris Jones?” Radicevic said, referencing the five-year, $159 million deal Jones signed with the Chiefs in 2024. Lawrence, having two years still left on his contract, also was creating a complicating factor, but motivation existed on Lawrence’s end.

Not only did Lawrence want to play with Joe Burrow, but a close friend and former teammate BJ Hill and good friend Tee Higgins, his former Clemson teammate who did the Sexy Dexy celebration at the Pro Bowl this year, helped move the money into a digestible range.

“He felt like this was a place where Dexter wanted to be, especially with the relationship with the players he has in the locker room,” Radicevic said. “He wanted a change of scenery and we wanted to add him. He understood where we were in terms of cap.”

The majority of the work came in structuring the contract that gave Lawrence a $6 million raise over the next two seasons combined and an $8 million bonus coming next March. The Bengals reduced his cap number this year ($15.3 million) and added a third year of team control that will operate like a team option, with Cincinnati saving $27 million against the cap if they moved on at that point.

From there, the arrow pointed back to the corner offices at Paycor Stadium.

“When we got close to what we felt was going to be an agreement on where we thought they were going to be contractually, we go back with Katie and Troy,” Radicevic said.

Thus, the question hung out there. For many teams and front offices, the answer would be an unequivocal yes. Some faster than others. For the Bengals, there just wasn’t a history of taking on this type of money and limiting their financial flexibility in future years while crunching cap space.

This meant deviating from organizational philosophy.

Blackburn and the front office declared this was a cost they could absorb this year and beyond.

“It’s not very often you get a chance to acquire an All-Pro for a price that you think is acceptable,” Tobin said, while also being sure to point out early and often, while speaking to the media Monday, the Bengals rank at the top of the league in spending.

He wasn’t lying, as the move put the Bengals at the top of the NFL active cap spending at this moment, and they currently rank 30th in remaining cap space. In terms of total cash spending, they rank eighth this season, their first time visiting the top 10 in that category since 2020, according to Spotrac.

They rank 21st in 2027 cap space and 13th in 2027 cap spending.

What was clear coming out of the Lawrence move was that they now must reevaluate the previous assumptions made about how they go forward. Tobin sounded more open to the possibility of restructuring Burrow’s contract than he was when originally asked about it in February.

There are also ramifications in the structure and aggressiveness of negotiations with upcoming extension-eligible players DJ Turner, Dax Hill and Chase Brown, as well as the fifth-year option decision for Myles Murphy.

“Those are challenges that we’ve accepted and we’re going to be working through those challenges as we go the next couple of years,” Tobin said. “But the opportunity to add those players outweighed those challenges. And we’re willing to go through the challenges to make it work.”

Bengals director of player personnel Duke Tobin credits team executive vice President Katie Blackburn for getting the Dexter Lawrence trade across the finish line.

Spending as the Bengals did in free agency and for Lawrence doesn’t happen in Cincinnati often and there’s never been more pressure on rookie classes to perform to make up for the value in future years than right now. There likely won’t be a free-agent spending spree like this in March of 2027.

There also won’t be a need for new highly paid stars since Burrow, Higgins, Chase, Lawrence and Mafe are all locked in for at least $20 million next year.

All those factors are baked in as a risk. Inevitably, risk would have followed whichever decision the front office made.

“It’s a risk if you are trading a guy,” Potts said. “It’s a risk if you’re spending a lot of money on a guy in free agency. It is a risk if you are drafting a guy at 10 or a guy at 110. There’s always a risk. With a dominant, impactful guy like Dexter Lawrence, we weighed all the odds. We weighed all the scenarios.”

All the research and calculation inevitably ended up in the meeting room in the corner office for the family ownership to finalize on a Saturday night in April.

Would they stray from who they’d been or reserve caution for the future?

The answer was to stray, and now organizational perception and reality will be forever changed in the eyes of its fan base.

“It really was exceptional, because we had opportunities come to us that we weren’t expecting financially and (Blackburn) was able to still make it work, which was sensational,” Tobin said, before adding to a later question. “It was a multi-layered negotiation. It wasn’t just cut-and-dry, and a lot of things had to come together. From Dexter’s end, from the New York Giants, and from the Cincinnati Bengals. Fortunately, it all did.”