1. Trae Waynes
Without further ado, we come to the player who has offered the least to the Bengals in 2021, and was there any doubt that it’d be Trae Waynes? The Bengals signed Waynes to a three-year deal worth $42 million and to say that he hasn’t lived up to the contract would be an understatement.
Since signing that three-year deal, Waynes has appeared in just two games for the Bengals and they came in Weeks 4 and 5 of this season. He missed all of last year due to injury, missed the first three games of this season, appeared in two, and has been on IR ever since. The cornerback has not been able to stay healthy.
In the two games Waynes was healthy for, he had just five tackles. PFF gave him a grade of 51.8, which isn’t a stellar grade for someone the Bengals shelled out a boatload of cash to.
The Waynes signing backfired significantly on Cincinnati but you can’t blame them for trying. He was one of the best cornerbacks on the free-agent market last year and the Bengals went out and got him. He didn’t have injury issues in Minnesota so no one could have predicted that the deal would have gone this poorly.
Even still, Waynes has offered the team the least this year and fans won’t care one bit if he’s cut this offseason.
These four Bengals have offered almost nothing to the team in 2021 but that doesn’t mean we won’t see something from them down the stretch.