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- Mar 16, 2019
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The Bills want to sign Josh Allen to a long-term deal, and Josh Allen wants to sign a long-term deal with the Bills. The Bills aren’t in a rush to get a deal done, knowing they have a fifth-year option they can exercise to ensure the quarterback remains in Buffalo at least through the 2022 season.
But the fifth-year option could create more of an urgency to get a deal done before the 2022 season since the Bills have two players they drafted in the first round in 2018.
The team has until May 3 to exercise the fifth-year options for Allen and Tremaine Edmunds. Allen’s fifth-year option is worth $23.106 million, while Edmunds’ is $12.716 million.
“The short answer is, we’re going to wait until after the draft to figure that out,” General Manager Brandon Beane said, via NFL Media. “We’ve had some discussions, but really, that’ll be front and center as soon as the draft is done.
“The hard part of this year is going to be, the cap has gone down, [we] don’t know exactly where it’s going to be next year, probably not a huge increase. Josh’s number is in the 20s because of a Pro Bowl. Tremaine has made a couple Pro Bowls, he’s pushing 13. You can’t really be flexible with those cap numbers, so we got to make sure if we pick them both up that we’re going to have close to 35 million space in next year’s cap. It’s not an ideal scenario from that to pick them both up and not extend them, so we just got to figure out how to make that work in our system. But we’ll have that answer once the draft is over.”
There is no decision to make: The Bills will pick up options for both players. However, a change in the Collective Bargaining Agreement makes the fifth-year option fully guaranteed once exercised.
The ideal scenario for the Bills would be to get long-term deals completed with both players at some point in the next year.