This is, after all, the team that traded away the 10th overall pick in the Dexter Lawrence deal. And it\u2019s a franchise that, beyond that, just doesn\u2019t do much in the way of trades.<\/p>\n
Dan Hoard sits down for an in-depth conversation with safety Bryan Cook as he prepares for his first season with his hometown team. Then, Dan visits with Ja\u2019Marr Chase at his annual football camp for Cincinnati area kids.<\/p>\n
Orr wrote: \u201cCincinnati recently declined the fifth-year option on its 2023 first-round pick, but Murphy, who played some of his best football down the stretch in 2025 and logged the majority of his quarterback hits and sacks over the final eight weeks of the season, will finally find a home in a deeper, rotational Bengals defense.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cObviously with Trey [Hendrickson] going to Baltimore that\u2019s going to be an exciting matchup each time we get to play them\u201d Burrow said. \u201cI love Trey. He\u2019s a competitive, fiery, unique personality that I\u2019ve got to be on the same sideline as him and watch him terrorize people for several years, and I\u2019m excited for that challenge.\u201d<\/p>\n
To address the issue, Cincy signed the highest-ranked free-agent safety in Gregg Rosenthal\u2019s Top 101, Bryan Cook, as well as Kyle Dugger. Cook was analytically elite last season, so the upgrade cannot be overstated. The Bengals also spent a third-round pick on cornerback Tacario Davis, who has the size (at nearly 6-foot-4) to play some snaps at safety and help cover tight ends. The Bengals were historically bad at that latter part last year, allowing the most yards to TEs in a single season (1,444) by any defense in the Super Bowl era, per NFL Research. The jury\u2019s out on whether this weakness becomes a strength in 2026, but at the very least, Cincinnati shored up a major hole.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s great, we always have a line of communication,\u201d Burrow said. \u201cI wasn\u2019t happy with how the last several years have gone, they weren\u2019t happy with how the last several years have gone. So we have that in common, and we just want to try to put a good product on the field that we can go and win games, win championships, and be competitive.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This is, after all, the team that traded away the 10th overall pick in the Dexter Lawrence deal.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":687867,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[20939,349,99],"class_list":["post-687866","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nfl","tag-cincinnati-bengals-news","tag-nfl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/687866","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=687866"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/687866\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/687867"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=687866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=687866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=687866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}