Shemar Stewart spent half of his rookie year hobbled and holding a clipboard, and now half of his second training camp is gone before July even ended. Cincinnati spent the No. 17 pick on a pass rusher because the defense needed real reinforcement up front last season, and the guy they picked keeps landing on the ground instead of in the backfield.
Stewart went down during an 11-on-11 drill on the first day of the Bengals’ 2026 training camp Wednesday, his left foot planting awkwardly before his knee buckled under him. He couldn’t put weight on it. He left the field on a cart, in a brace, and every account from the practice field described the kind of moment that makes a building go quiet.
Follow-up imaging came back better than it looked live: a hyperextended knee, no ligament damage. Zac Taylor called the team “very fortunate,” which is the kind of thing a coach says when he watched a guy get carted off and expected to hear the word “torn.” Stewart is still projected to miss several weeks of camp, which is a far cry from the recovery arc Nick Bosa is still working through after his own torn ACL, and about as good an outcome as anyone in that building could have hoped for once the cart showed up.
Here’s where it gets weird: this is the second July in a row that a Bengals defensive lineman has gone down on an early practice day. Myles Murphy left camp on a cart last summer too, though that one turned out to be heat cramps and an IV bag, not a hyperextended joint. Different injuries, different severities. Same result: a defensive front that can’t get through the first week of camp intact.
That’s a coincidence you can wave off once, but twice starts to look like a depth chart with no cushion in it.
Stewart never got a real runway as a rookie either. A holdout delayed his start, then ankle and knee problems limited him to eight games and one sack before he landed on injured reserve. Cincinnati took him 17th overall out of Texas A&M specifically to rebuild that pass rush, and fifteen months later he still hasn’t strung together a healthy stretch long enough to prove it was the right pick.
I watched the cart-off clip on a loop during my run along the lake this morning, and I still can’t get past how routine the play looked right before it happened. No blitz, no pile-up, just a foot planting wrong in a drill that happens a thousand times a practice.
WCPO’s Caleb Noe caught the whole sequence on video:
https://twitter.com/CalebNoeTV/status/2082494959895146795
It’s not the only camp scare in Cincinnati this summer. Ja’Marr Chase already turned a helmet into a sideline scrum, but that dust-up is theater. Stewart’s knee is the actual football problem, and it’s the kind that shows up on Sundays in November, not just in a highlight reel from a Tuesday practice. Cincinnati got lucky on the knee.
The pass rush already ran out of luck.
