Bengals Are Apparently Still Trying to Save Souls

Cornerback Pacman Jones – remember him? – recently worked out for the Cincinnati Bengals. Another Jones with a checkered past, the former Jaguar first-round receiver Matt Jones, could also be going to the Bengals. (Matt Jones faced felony drug charges for cocaine possession in 2008; he avoided trial by agreeing to enter drug court.) Both players were out of football in ’09.

Perhaps the story here is not that the Bengals would flirt with both Joneses, but that they would wait until Valentine’s weekend, 2010, to do so. The Bengals are the team that had 10 players arrested during a 14-month span in ’06-’07. They took the obligatory “clean up our image” route, then re-signed wideout Chris Henry (five arrests in four years), brought in defensive tackle Tank Johnson (suspended eight games in ’07) and signed running backs Cedric Benson (two alcohol-related arrests in roughly a one-month span with the Bears) and Larry Johnson (four arrests, two suspensions with the Chiefs).

(It should be noted that just days before Benson signed with Cincinnati, charges for both arrests were dropped because of a lack of evidence.) And earlier this month, linebacker Rey Maualuga, who fell to the second round of the ’09 draft in part because of character concerns, planned to enter the Betty Ford Center after a drunken driving arrest.

The commonality between these players, and those still on the roster who contributed to the 10-arrest plight (cornerbacks Leon Hall and Jonathan Joseph, defensive end Frostee Rucker), is that, save for Rucker, all were first- or second-round draft choices.

The Bengals’ owner Mike Brown, who calls the shots, doesn’t speak to the news media much these days. But he said to reporters in 2007: “I guess the world is divided up between redeemers and non-redeemers. I happen to be a redeemer. I think people can be made better and right. If that’s a fault, so be it. These guys misstepped, they made mistakes, they paid prices for it that have been verging on ruinous, but that doesn’t mean I dislike them personally.”

More here http://fifthdown.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/12/bengals-are-apparently-still-trying-to-save-souls/