Cincinnati Bengals sign WR Colbie Young

Colbie Young's signing earns a C+ Contract Value Index (CVI), which tells you everything you need to know about the nature of this deal — it's a low-cost roster addition that carries modest upside but equally modest expectations. At a $1.29M AAV across four years for a total of just over $5.1M, this is textbook minimum-scale wide receiver money, the kind of contract that populates the bottom of a depth chart without creating any real cap liability. Young profiles as a developmental or fringe-roster wide receiver at this stage of his career — not a plug-and-play contributor, but a player the Bengals can evaluate over multiple preseasons without meaningful financial consequence. The CVI lands in the middle of the grading curve because the contract itself is virtually risk-free from a cap standpoint, but that cap efficiency is offset by significant uncertainty around whether Young can carve out a legitimate role at the NFL level. For a Bengals team sitting at 6-11 and needing to find answers at multiple roster spots, this type of signing represents the kind of low-floor, low-ceiling swing that makes sense in volume but rarely moves the needle on its own. The four-year structure gives Cincinnati enough runway to develop Young without committing to a meaningful second contract prematurely, which is about the best you can say for a deal of this size.