It seemed impossible for a while there, or at least extremely unlikely, but the Cincinnati Bengals were able to lock up star wide receivers Ja’Marr Chase and Tee Higgins both on new long-term deals. Both players will now be suiting up in Cincinnati for the foreseeable future.

Having the deals done is an enormous relief for the organization, the players involved and fans alike. Now all sides can move forward, focus on the future and try to get the Bengals back into the contender conversation in the AFC after two straight seasons outside of the playoff picture.

The Bengals still have several other areas of need that they need to address over the offseason, and now they can concentrate on those other areas knowing that they’re pretty well set at the wide receiver spot for the time being.

So, what will they do next? Here, we took a stab at predicting what the team’s next two moves might be.

Add a guard, edge rusher in free agency

The Bengals were kind of in a holding pattern in free agency until they hammered out the massive deals with Chase and Higgins. Now that those are done, they can look to upgrade in other areas, namely in the pass-rush department and on the offensive line. Adding edge rush and guard depth should be a priority.

Luckily, the organization ironed out the deals for Chase and Higgins relatively early on in free agency, which was the stated goal of Bengals director of player personnel Duke Tobin.

“The earlier we can do some of this stuff, the freer it gives us to build the rest of the team,” Tobin said of the situation last month. “We have other needs that we want to build, and so we want to get these kind of things done early enough to where we can really focus on building out the rest of the football team.”

We’re only a week into free agency, so there are still a lot of productive players available on the market, and now that the Bengals have their star receivers taken care of, they could capitalize on some of that available talent.

Figure out an extension with Trey Hendrickson

The fact that Higgins came to an agreement on a long-term extension with Cincinnati shows that there’s a path for Hendrickson to do the same. Like Hendrickson, Higgins requested a trade last offseason, but Higgins and the organization were ultimately able to figure things out. Perhaps they’ll be able to do the same with Hendrickson.

When it comes to a potential trade involving the star defensive end, the Bengals have maintained an extremely high asking price, which indicates that they clearly value Hendrickson highly. Hendrickson, who still has one year remaining on his current contract, has also made it clear that his preference would be to continue his career in Cincinnati.

It certainly doesn’t sound like a breakup is unavoidable. Hopefully Cincinnati’s front office will ride the momentum from getting deals done with Chase and Higgins and figure something out with Hendrickson too, because they really need his presence on defense.