Trey Hendrickson has said he won't play under his current contract. Well, Bengals training camp starts on Tuesday, and Trey Hendrickson won't be there — in fact, according to his Instagram page, he's completely left the state of Ohio, heading down to Florida to do... whatever they do in Florida. Contract talks are tough when a player is about 900 miles away from where his team is located, so it doesn't appear that the sides are anywhere close to a resolution.
It's only the first day of camp, so there's plenty of time to get a deal done before the actual season starts, but... there's also been plenty of time all offseason and a deal didn't get done, and now training camp is here and Hendrickson is not. Last year's NFL sack leader isn't interested in playing if a deal doesn't get done, and it's hard to fathom why the Bengals wouldn't want to get one signed. But it's hard to fathom why the Bengals do a lot of things.
Bengals offseason contract nightmares continue with Trey Hendrickson holdout
First (and still) it was rookie first-round pick Shemar Stewart holding out of Bengals training camp in a dispute that doesn't seem destined to end any time soon as we've now reached the part of discussions where we're talking about paying Stewart if he goes to prison? He's not in prison right now, for the record, and hopefully he never goes to prison. Things have gotten weird over there.
Now it's fellow defensive end Trey Hendrickson joining Stewart on the holdout train, and the Bengals season feels like it's gotten a little precarious and it's July! Maybe that's an overreaction, considering the Bengals still have plenty of starpower on both sides of the ball, but their elite defensive end (and the rookie that was supposed to complement him) are nowhere to be found because one's in Florida and one's not in jail but the team owner seems to want him to be, for some reason!
If the season starts and neither of these players are on the Bengals roster, that's an abject disaster. It might not fully ruin the season, but it surely wouldn't help, either.