Stat of the Jay: Where Does Bengals’ Drought Without a Second Contract for an OL Draft Pick Rank Among Other Teams?

CINCINNATI – Today’s Stat of the Jay stems from a question posed in response to the article earlier this week about where the good guards come from and why the Cincinnati Bengals haven’t been able to find them.

The article mentioned that the last time the Bengals gave a second contract to any offensive line draft pick was in 2015, when they rewarded 2011 fourth-round pick Clint Boling with a five-year, $26 million extension just hours before free agency began.

That prompted a response from @RandyHollings13 stating how wild of a stat that is while asking if any other team has gone that long.

The answer is “no.”

Each of the other 31 teams has signed at least one offensive line draft pick to a second contract.

But the methodology of the stat dive delivers an even more damning indictment of the Bengals failures.

It’s an exhaustive exercise to look up the contract history of every offensive line draft pick for every team for more than a decade.

So while the Bengals stat refers to all rounds of the draft, I limited the deep dive to just first- through fourth-round picks because those are the guys most likely to receive a second contract.

And still, 30 of the other 31 teams have given at least one offensive line draft pick a second contract.

The San Francisco 49ers are the only team that hasn’t, but they gave 2011 fifth-round pick Daniel Kilgore a second contract, and they’ve given 2020 fifth-round pick Colton McKivitz three one-year extensions.

As far as which team next to the Bengals has gone the longest, that would be the Pittsburgh Steelers, who gave 2012 first-round pick David DeCastro a five-year, $50 million extension on Sept. 8, 2016.

That was 548 days after the Bengals signed Boling to his extension.

Since the Bengals drafted Boling, they have selected 18 offensive linemen who were/are eligible for an extension without awarding a second contract.

Amarius Mims appears likely to break the streak sometimes after he becomes eligible following the 2027 season, but that’s a long way off.

Here is the list:

Kevin Zeitler, first round, 2012 (still playing)

Tanner Hawkinson, fifth, 2013

Reid Fragel, seventh, 2013

T.J. Johnson, seventh, 2013

Russell Bodine, fourth, 2014

Cedric Ogbuehi, first, 2015

Jake Fisher, second, 2015

Christian Westerman, fifth, 2016

J.J. Dielman, fifth, 2017

Billy Price, first, 2018

Rod Taylor, seventh, 2018

Jonah Williams, first, 2019

Michael Jordan, fourth, 2019

Hakeem Adeniji, sixth, 2020

Jackson Carman, second, 2021

D’Ante Smith, fourth, 2021

Trey Hill, sixth, 2021

Cordell Volson, fourth, 2022

Here is a chart with each team’s total number of Rounds 1-4 offensive line draft picks from 2011 (Boling’s draft) to 2022 (the last draft in which players are extension eligible), along with the number of second contracts and the details of the most recent one.

List of second contracts given to offensive linemen selected from 2011-22. — Contract info via Spotrac

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