Whether Hendrickson decides to show up is unclear, but the bigger concern now seems to be with Stewart, who cannot practice until he is signed. The Bengals are taking a hard stance on the language in the contract with which Stewart takes issue.
“I think Shemar needs to be here,” Tobin said. “The No. 1 thing a young player can do is have a fast start and have a good rookie season. That normally translates into a long productive NFL career, and he needs to be here getting to work on it. He can be a really a good piece of our football team, which is a championship caliber football team. And he can provide a lot of good reps for us, but he’s got to be here to do it.
Credit: AP
Credit: AP
“I hope he gets here. I’m not going to blame Shemar. He’s listening to the advice that he’s paying for. I don’t understand or believe or agree with the advice. But I’m not the one paying for it. If I thought we were treating him unfairly as it relates to all the other draft picks in this year’s draft, then maybe it’d be a different story. But we’re not. Again, I don’t fully understand where things are there.”
Stewart spoke candidly about his concerns with the contract during the final week of the team’s offseason workout program, when he said he just wants the language in his contract to mirror that of Cincinnati’s previous two first-round picks, Myles Murphy and Amarius Mims, who both went later than him in their respective draft years.
The language has to do with future guarantees that could be voided if he is suspended for on- or off-field issues. Cincinnati has not added such language in the past, but it has become standard with other teams around the league.
Tobin said the Bengals are just trying to go to “what all the other first-round picks got.”
“Everyone evolves, but Cincinnati, is what you’re saying,” Tobin said. “It really doesn’t make any sense to say that Cincinnati doesn’t get to evolve their contracts, yet the rest of the league evolves their contracts. I don’t buy into that philosophy at all. Contracts evolve. I’ve been in it 30 years. They’ve evolved every year for 30 years.
“They evolve in good ways for players. Signing bonuses go up. That’s an evolution. Guarantees get extended further down the draft. That’s an evolution. You can’t just say you want the positive evolutions, but yet the teams can’t evolve their language to be clearer on the meaning that is actually agreed to, which is why other teams have done it. We’re not asking for anything anybody else isn’t already doing. So, do I feel badly about it? I do not.”
Credit: AP
Credit: AP
Even Bengals owner Mike Brown, who twice in a 16-minute interview Monday said he didn’t want to offend people on other topics, called the situation with Stewart “peculiar.”
“His agents wants it to be so that if he acted in a terrible fashion -- this is all hypothetical, something that rises to the level of going to prison -- that we would be on the line for the guarantee (of) future years that hadn’t been paid,” Brown said. “And our position is no, if that happens, we’re not going to be. We’re not going to be paying someone who’s sitting in jail. That’s not what we’re going to do.”
“It is a negotiation that has reached the level of, I can only think of a word I shouldn’t use here, but it’s silliness. We’ll have to wait until we get a better result. I think eventually that’s going to happen. I don’t think it’s going to happen today or tomorrow, but at some point, it will.”
Hendrickson, meanwhile, is seeking stability for his family as he enters the final year of his contract.
In an interview with local media in May, he declared he won’t play on his current deal, but while Hendrickson said he isn’t looking to become the highest paid player at his position, he also shared he isn’t going to feel bad about the market driving up the price when he has been asking for a long-term contract for two years now.
The Steelers just reset the market when they made 30-year-old T.J. Watt the highest-paid edge rusher with a $41 million annual average value deal on a three-year, $123 million extension.
“Trey is an important part of our team, and he’s under contract,” Tobin said. “We expect all of our guys under contract to be here. He’s a guy who has been very valuable. Like I said before, he’s earned a raise and an extension, and we’ll continue to see if we can come together on something. Having good players is a good problem to have, and we’ve got a lot of good players, and we’ve got a lot of highly-paid players, and fitting it together is what we’re working for.”
Brown said when you look into what the Bengals are offering, it is comparable to other top-tier edge rushers’ contracts; however, he didn’t want to go into details about the negotiation process.
“I’m not looking to offend Trey by saying something, and I’m not looking to try to justify where we are,” Brown said. “I think we’re in a good spot. I hope this thing comes together soon, and I’m just going to leave it at that. You guys can say what you want. I’m not going to say very much until it gets done, and then I’m just going to say we’re glad to have him, which we are, or will be.”
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