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The Bills want to sign Josh Allen for a long-term deal, and Josh Allen wants to sign a long-term deal with the Bills. The Bills are in no rush to make a deal, knowing they have a fifth-year option they can exercise to make sure the quarterback stays at Buffalo at least until the 2022 season.
But the fifth-year option could create more urgency to close a deal before the 2022 season, as the Bills have two players they drafted in the first round in 2018.
The team has until May 3 to exercise its fifth-year options for Allen and Tremaine Edmunds. Allen’s fifth-year option is worth $ 23.106 million, while Edmunds is worth $ 12.716 million.
“The short answer is, we’re going to wait until after the concept to figure that out,” said General Manager Brandon Beane via NFL Media. ‘We’ve had some discussions, but really, that will be central once the concept is ready.
“The hardest part of this year will be, the cap has dropped, [we] not sure where it will be next year, probably not a huge increase. Josh’s number is in the 1920s because of a Pro Bowl. Tremaine made a few Pro Bowls, he pushes 13. You can’t really be flexible with those cap numbers, so we have to make sure that when we pick them both up, we have nearly 35 million space in the next year’s cap. It’s not an ideal scenario to take them both up and not expand them, so we just have to figure out how to make that work in our system. But we’ll have that answer once the tour is over. “
No decision has to be made: the Bills include options for both players. However, due to a change in the CLA, the option for the fifth year is fully guaranteed once it has been exercised.
The ideal scenario for the Bills would be to sign long-term deals with both players sometime in the next year.