The Bengals Spent the Offseason Building a Defense. Camp Is Already Dismantling It.

Consider what the front office actually bought this summer. Dexter Lawrence, one of the five best defensive tackles in football, acquired in June to anchor a line that was statistically exposed all of 2025. Bryan Cook signed to shore up a secondary that, last season, had essentially one defensive back logging meaningful snaps. The investment was real, the urgency justified — Cincinnati's defense left 4.6 wins on the field last year, the quantified gap between what that offense deserved and what the team actually got. You don't spend like that unless you understand the problem precisely.

The problem now is that the spending assumed healthy bodies, and training camp has already broken that assumption twice.

Shemar Stewart, the first-round defensive end who was supposed to give this rebuilt front something it has never had — a genuine, homegrown pass rusher — was carted off on July 29 during the first 11-on-11 drill of camp. A hyperextended knee. He's listed Questionable, which in August means the optimistic scenario, not the reassuring one. I wrote last week that Stewart's injury broke the Bengals' only defensive plan. What's happened since hasn't changed that read. Then B.J. Hill, who had received a positive health update heading into camp and was slotted as the second interior defensive tackle on the depth chart, was placed Out. Two of the three players Cincinnati is counting on to generate interior pressure are now either unavailable or uncertain heading into the final weeks before the season opens.

What makes this particularly difficult is the depth chart behind them. The defensive tackle rotation lists Jonathan Allen as the primary contributor, with Lawrence third in production share — a function of his recent arrival, not his talent. But the names behind those three at the position carry no established production from last season at all. The pass rush on the edge is similarly unproven; the depth chart at defensive end shows no player with meaningful documented production from 2025. That was always the gamble with a rebuild centered on new acquisitions and a first-round pick — it required everyone to be available, and it required Stewart specifically to be ready from day one.

The secondary situation compounds the concern rather than alleviates it. The cornerback depth is thin by any measure — one corner produced meaningful snaps last season, and the depth behind him has no established track record. The linebacker rotation carried only two contributors with real playing time. These were known vulnerabilities entering camp; the Stewart and Hill situations transform them from manageable concerns into something more structural. A defense that needed its new pieces to perform immediately now needs them to perform shorthanded.

My read is this: the Bengals are not a broken team. The offensive core — Burrow, Chase, Higgins, Chase Brown — is intact and capable of carrying games the way it did for stretches of 2025. But the entire premise of this offseason was that the defense would finally meet the offense somewhere in the middle, that the 4.6-win gap would narrow. That premise required a functional defensive front. Right now, the front office's most important acquisitions are either on the injury report or racing against a clock that training camp is not slowing down. The investment was sound. Whether the bodies hold up long enough to honor it is the question that will define Cincinnati's 2026 before a regular-season snap is played.