Bengals DE Boye Mafe Makes Honest Assessment of Team Ahead of OTAs

The Cincinnati Bengals finished the 2025 season with one of the worst defenses in the NFL. Last season, they surrendered the third-most points in the league, led all teams in missed tackles, and allowed more explosive plays than any other roster in football.

The offseason that followed demanded aggressive action at multiple positions. One of the first and most significant responses came on March 12, when the franchise landed a player who had just celebrated a Super Bowl championship.

The Bengals signed Boye Mafe to a three-year contract through the 2028 season, bringing in the 27-year-old edge rusher from the Seattle Seahawks to address the pass rush void left by Trey Hendrickson’s departure to Baltimore. The deal is worth $60 million over three years with $19 million guaranteed. 

On Thursday, Mafe spoke openly about his first impressions of Cincinnati.

“It’s been great. All the guys are welcoming, they are letting me in with open arms. Being able to walk into a locker room as open as this — just grateful, coming from a different situation and different city,” Mafe told WLWT’s Jaron May.

He was also asked whether he sees a Super Bowl-caliber defensive line in the current Bengals unit. 

“I see the hunger in everybody,” Mafe said. “I see how, especially the group we got, everyone is willing to learn and to put the work in. That’s gonna take us so far.”

In four seasons with Seattle, Mafe appeared in 65 games with 34 starts, recording 161 tackles, 24 tackles for loss, 20 sacks, 14 passes defensed, and three forced fumbles. His breakout came in 2023 when he led the Seahawks with a career-high nine sacks, recording at least one in seven consecutive games, the longest such streak in franchise history. 

His 2024 campaign added six more sacks and eight tackles for loss across 15 games. In 2025, his role shifted to rotational as Seattle made its Super Bowl run. Mafe finished with two sacks, 31 tackles, and a forced fumble while earning a 70.3 PFF grade before posting three pressures and a quarterback hit in Super Bowl LX.

Mafe’s championship experience is now inside Cincinnati’s building, and it’s already influencing the room’s youngest members. He has taken second-round rookie Cashius Howell under his wing from the opening days of the voluntary program.

“He has the hunger, he wants to learn and that’s the first thing you have to have when it comes to playing this game,” Mafe said of the 22-year-old. “Just gotta have the ‘want to.’ As long as you have the ‘want to’ and the work ethic to do it, everything else will take care of itself. I’m excited to see him play. I’m excited to see him out there.”

The edge rotation Mafe walks into features himself, Howell, Myles Murphy, and Shemar Stewart, all operating behind an interior anchored by Jonathan Allen and B.J. Hill alongside the team’s marquee offseason addition, Dexter Lawrence. 

With one the Bengals’ deepest defensive rosters in years now assembled around him, Mafe won’t be asked to replicate Hendrickson’s production overnight. He simply needs to be the experienced, disciplined edge presence that makes the unit more dangerous collectively.