The Patriots want to make it hard for the Bills to keep Chris Hogan.
According to Ian Rapoport of the NFL Network, the Patriots are expected to give the restricted free agent wide receiver a “heavily guaranteed” three-year, $12 million offer sheet.
The Bills would have five days to match from whenever the offer sheet was executed, and if they don’t match, they’d get no compensation since Hogan was undrafted and they used the low RFA tender ($1.67 million) on him.
Hogan has all the kind of, ahem, lunch-pail qualities the Patriots seem to like in their wideouts. He’s also a former lacrosse player and has the ability to be an emergency punter, so he check off all the Bill Belichick fetish boxes. If he had gone to Rutgers, he’d have probably been a Patriot long ago.
The Bills are also one of the teams with the least room under the salary cap at the moment, which may make matching difficult, even if it means losing a valuable part to a division rival.
