The outside rankings and the front-office trajectory are telling different stories about Amarius Mims. Days after the Cincinnati Bengals right tackle was left off ESPN’s top-10 offensive tackle survey, The Athletic’s Paul Dehner Jr. wrote that Mims is the logical candidate for Cincinnati’s next major financial commitment on offense — an assessment Pro Football Rumors’ Adam La Rose expanded on Tuesday.
The case rests on availability and arc. Mims, the No. 18 pick in 2024, has started 30 of his 32 career appearances and enters this season as the fixed point at right tackle. His Pro Football Focus grade improved in 2025, climbing to 40th among 84 qualifying tackles — middle of the pool as a number, but the direction matters more than the rank for a player who arrived from Georgia regarded as one of the rawest premium picks in his class. The contract mechanics give Cincinnati room to wait: a first-round pick cannot sign an extension until after his third season, so nothing gets finalized before the 2027 offseason, and the team holds a fifth-year option decision next spring that would add a locked-in 2028.
Protection spending has been the clearest pattern of the Joe Burrow era — the quarterback’s own extension, then Ja’Marr Chase and Tee Higgins — but the line itself has been funded more carefully. Only left tackle Orlando Brown Jr., extended this spring, carries an eight-figure annual average, and guard Dalton Risner was re-signed to keep the interior settled. A Mims deal in 2027 would make both bookends permanent. After an offseason in which the unit’s outside reputation lagged well behind Burrow’s own praise for it, an early extension would state plainly which evaluation the organization believes.
What comes next is on the field. Dehner notes the 23-year-old is positioned to cement himself as the anchor of the line in 2026, and a strong season turns this from projection into negotiation by spring.
No fantasy roster carries a right tackle, but every Bengals asset is priced on the pocket holding — Burrow’s floor is the entire Cincinnati stack. If Mims delivers the season The Athletic projects, it shows up indirectly as Burrow attempts, Chase and Higgins ceilings, and fewer of the injury discounts that have shadowed this offense for years.
