He's quietly been one of the better players on a strong Cincinnati Bengals defense, even called their "secret weapon" by Pro Football Focus last season. Now safety George Iloka is the in the 4th and final year of his rookie contract with the Bengals, and all signs point to a forthcoming extension. We'll assess the current value of Iloka, stacking him up against four of the top safeties in the league with recent contracts to project what his extension might look like.

To generate a prediction the Spotrac team determined that the following safeties were viable targets to use in comparing with Iloka. The key was to locate players with similar numbers, who signed a contract around the age of 25. To determine a more likely starting point for our numbers, we'll perform a linear regression of each contract listed below.

Note: A linear regression is a formula that plots the provided points of data for Length and Value of the contracts, and then generates the best-fit line for those points, resulting in a "slope" value that translates to an average annual salary.

View the list of Top Average Paid Safeties in the NFL

Because Iloka (25) is older than a few of our variables at the time of their signings, we'll adjust the above contracts up/down to make each variable player 25 years old. Once a linear regression is performed on these new numbers we're given the following terms to begin with:

Now we'll assess Iloka statistically against our variable safeties, taking a look at Games Played, Tackles/G, INT/G, QBR Against/Season, and WR Catch % per Season.

Where he lacks in the "flashy stat" department, Iloka certainly makes up for in terms of coverage. His 38.6 QBR against rating is the best in the league over the past two seasons, and wide receivers have caught less than half of the passes thrown in his vicinity over that time period. He's an elite strong safety and will likely be valued as such below. We'll apply his prime percentages into our original base contract value to determine his current value.

Length of the Contract
In general safeties have been tacking on 4-5 new years in their recent extensions, with strong safeties averaging more on the lower end. All four of our variables signed 4 year extensions, so we'll assume the same for Iloka.

Value of the Contract
The Bengals have been stealing over the past few seasons, as Iloka's 5th round wage scaled contract has paid out just $1.87M since 2012. He gets a bit of a bump in year four, currently set to make $1.542 million in 2015. Our base contract gave us an average annual value just under $6.8M, a figure that would rank him 11th among all safeties, 4th among strong safeties. With positive statistical percentages yet to be factored in, this figure is going up.

Low Value (HOMETOWN DISCOUNT)
Utilizing our Median Prime Percentage (4.07%), we're forecasting Iloka as the 7th AAV paid S, highest SS:
4 years, $28,284,041 | $7,071,010 per year | $10,925,000 guaranteed

High Value (MAX-VALUE DEAL)
Utilizing our Average Prime Percentage (5.50%), we're forecasting Iloka as the 7th AAV paid S, highest SS:
4 years, $28,672,685 | $7,168,171 per year | $11,225,000 guaranteed

We'll split the difference to offer the best-value forecast for Iloka next contract: