The Bengals’ rebuilt pass rush is drawing some real attention heading into the 2026 NFL season, and ESPN’s Seth Walder believes one of Cincinnati’s new edge threats could land among the league’s more productive sack artists.
Boye Mafe is the lone Bengal projected to crack the top 50 in sacks, coming in at No. 40 with six. That gives Cincinnati at least one name on the list as the team rolls into a season with a fresh group of pass rushers aimed at quarterbacks.
Just behind him, new Bengals mauler Dexter Lawrence sits outside the top 50 with a projection of five sacks. Lawrence is coming off a career-low half-sack season, but Walder’s forecast sees him rebounding a bit against what he called a juicy set of immobile quarterbacks.
“After a down 2025 season, Lawrence was traded to the Bengals from the Giants for the 10th overall pick,” Walder wrote. “What kind of player will the Bengals get -- the Lawrence of a few years ago or who he was last season? The projections are splitting the difference.
"Lawrence's sacks fell off last season despite him playing less nose tackle than the previous couple of years. But the projections won't totally quit him because of what he has done in the past. Plus, the Bengals face the easiest schedule in the league this season overall (which helps their predicted win total) and the easiest schedule of quarterbacks in terms of past sack rate."
Walder also noted that, “This is the sixth consecutive year we've run our sack forecast for veteran pass rushers based on a statistical model that uses information about a player's past performance and current circumstances to project how many sacks he will record in the upcoming season.”
There’s still reason to think the pressure can come from plenty of places, not just the obvious names. Myles Murphy, for one, has a chance to build on a career-high 5.5 sacks from last season and do more damage with a bigger workload.
The bigger picture for Cincinnati is that this won’t be about one guy carrying the load. It’s shaping up as a front-seven effort, with plenty of players entering their second season in Al Golden’s system and trying to lift the Bengals from their t-22nd ranking in team sacks last year, when they finished with 35.
For Murphy and the rest of the group, that gives the sack projections a simple message: there’s room to climb.
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