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The Bengals’ decision to release WR Chris Henry Thursday morning, hours after Henry surrendered to Cincinnati police on charges of misdemeanor assault and criminal damaging stemming from a March 31 incident in which Henry allegedly struck an 18-year-old man and smashed a beer bottle against a car, was stunning, given how quickly and decisively the team acted.
The Bengals have been down this road before with Henry — it’s his fifth arrest in less than three years with the club. Before Thursday, standard operating procedure was for the club to cloak itself in the NFL’s Collective Bargaining Agreement, allowing the league and the legal system to mete out the bulk of the discipline. This approach was a sound legal one, but all it ultimately did was make the Bengals look foolish.
At 24, Henry’s NFL career is probably over. Commissioner Roger Goodell will not look kindly upon this new set of allegations, and a lengthy suspension could be forthcoming.
We will probably remember Henry as a better player than he actually was. He caught 17 TD passes in three NFL seasons, but he benefited from working with WRs Chad Johnson and T.J. Houshmandzadeh and QB Carson Palmer. He didn’t always play hard, and he was a nonfactor in some games. The inclination with talented-but-troubled people is to shake our head wistfully at how gifted they were, and this can lead to slight, if unintentional, embellishment of those talents.
The Bengals drafted Henry in the third round of the ’05 draft, one of the worst in franchise history. First-round pick David Pollack’s career has been derailed because of a neck injury. The second-round pick, LB Odell Thurman, was a case similar to Henry’s — a talented player with character questions. The Bengals gambled and lost: Thurman played one season, then was suspended for most of the next two. He has applied for reinstatement with the NFL, but the Bengals aren’t counting on him.
Ever counting on Henry was a risky proposition.
“Whichever team drafts him will get a very talented, potential No. 1 receiver, but he will not be easy to manage and could be an even bigger distraction in the pros,” wrote Nolan Nawrocki in PFW’s 2005 Draft Preview. Henry spent three years at West Virginia, playing two and gaining notoriety for an incident in which he was ejected for two unsportsmanlike conduct penalties in an '04 game vs. Rutgers.
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Chris Henry
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The Bengals worked with Henry for three seasons, the last two as Henry’s legal problems and the pressure on the franchise to cut ties with him mounted. Before the events of this week, the Bengals apparently believed they couldn’t justify cutting Henry on the basis of performance and couldn’t bear to have someone so promising walk out the door and succeed somewhere else. So they kept him on the roster.
They have made wiser decisions.
“The Bengals tried for an extended period of time to support Chris and his potentially bright career,” Bengals owner Mike Brown said Thursday. “We had hoped to guide him toward an appropriate standard of personal responsibility that this community would support and that would allow him to play in the NFL. We acknowledge those fans who had concerns about Chris; at the same time we tried to help a young man.
“But those efforts end today, as we move on with what is best for our team.”
The release of Henry comes two days after head coach Marvin Lewis dealt smartly and appropriately with WR Chad Johnson’s continued lobbying for a change of scenery and complaints about the way the Bengals have treated him. Speaking at the NFL’s annual meeting, Lewis indicated in no uncertain terms that if Johnson were to play in 2008, it would be for the Bengals, who hold his rights for four more years. On Thursday, in a sometimes rambling interview on ESPN’s “SportsCenter,” Johnson said he would report to the team’s mandatory June minicamp and “embarrass everybody that tries to cover me.”
The Bengals have gone out of their way to treat Johnson fairly from a financial standpoint, twice signing him to lucrative contracts. And the franchise has generally been tolerant of his emotional outbursts. Lewis took the right stance — the Bengals aren’t going to be bullied by Johnson.
But you can’t feel too sorry for the Bengals; they have to know that employing Johnson doesn’t come without its downside. Yes, he’s a top talent at a very important position, but he occasionally is going to be a distraction.
And the Bengals knew the risk they were taking in keeping Henry on the roster the past two seasons, too. If he matured, if he became an even better receiver, perhaps their patience would be rewarded — and not remembered as weakness.
Henry didn’t hold up his end of the deal, and finally the Bengals acted tough, for there was nothing left to do. It was the right decision, but it left you with the hollow feeling that comes from reacting too late.
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