Stewart's Knee Just Broke the Bengals' Only Defensive Plan
The math was already uncomfortable before July 29. Now it's alarming.
Cincinnati's 2025 season produced one of the more damning statistical portraits in recent NFL memory: a team whose offensive firepower was sufficient to win roughly 40 percent of its games, yet whose defense converted that advantage into wins only 35 percent of the time. That 4.6-win gap wasn't bad luck or a few close bounces—it was a structural indictment of a pass rush and secondary that couldn't hold leads, couldn't create stops, and couldn't protect one of the most productive offensive trios in the league. Joe Burrow, Ja'Marr Chase, and Tee Higgins gave this franchise a puncher's chance every single week. The defense kept leaving the ring early.
The front office understood the diagnosis and responded aggressively. Dexter Lawrence arrived as a statement acquisition—a top-tier interior presence meant to anchor a defensive line that had been a sieve. Bryan Cook signed to address a secondary so thin that only one defensive back logged meaningful playing time all of last season. B.J. Hill got a positive health update before camp. The plan was coherent: reinforce the interior, stabilize the back end, and give Shemar Stewart—the first-round edge rusher—room to develop into the disruptive force the pass rush desperately needed. It wasn't a perfect rebuild, but it was a plan. Then the first 11-on-11 drill of training camp happened.
Stewart being carted off on July 29 with a hyperextended knee isn't just an injury update. It's a structural threat to the entire defensive theory of the case. The Bengals' pass rush depth chart, even before this, was built on projection and optimism rather than proven production. The edge group—Cedric Johnson, Antwaun Powell-Ryland, Boye Mafe—carries essentially no recorded production from last season. Mafe drew some attention this offseason by comparing the defense to Seattle's Super Bowl-winning unit, which is exactly the kind of quote that ages poorly when your anchor rusher is in a cart six weeks before the opener. Stewart was the player who was supposed to make those comparisons feel less absurd. Now he's Questionable, which in training camp hyperextended-knee language is a word that covers an enormous range of bad outcomes.
The situation is compounded by what's already broken around him. B.J. Hill, who shared meaningful defensive tackle snaps last season, is now Out. Lawrence remains healthy, which matters—he's a genuine difference-maker and the most important defensive acquisition this franchise has made in years. But Lawrence plays inside. He cannot replace what Stewart was supposed to provide off the edge. And with Hill out, the interior itself is thinner than the depth chart suggests. The secondary remains a genuine concern: the cornerback group produced at a fraction of what functional NFL corners typically generate last season, with essentially no proven depth behind the starter. Linebacker depth is similarly sparse. This is a defense being asked to take a significant step forward while simultaneously losing bodies at multiple levels.
What makes this particularly difficult to absorb is the offensive context. Burrow threw 17 touchdowns in just eight games last season before his availability was curtailed. Chase and Higgins are both active and healthy. Chase Brown ran for over a thousand yards. The offensive infrastructure is intact, elite, and ready. The Bengals have the offensive talent to compete for a division title—they've had it for years. The 4.6-win gap wasn't a talent problem on that side of the ball. It was a defensive problem, and the defensive problem just got meaningfully worse on the first day of real contact. My read is that this team can still make the defensive rebuild work if Stewart returns healthy and Lawrence performs as advertised—but the margin for error, which was already thin when I wrote about this last week, has now essentially disappeared. One more significant injury to this group and the 2026 season risks looking a great deal like 2025: a spectacular offense, a broken defense, and a final record that doesn't come close to reflecting what the offense deserved.