Cincinnati Bengals star pass rusher Trey Hendrickson told ESPN’s Adam Schefter that he will not be reporting to training camp, which is scheduled to begin tomorrow. Hendrickson is currently in Jacksonville, Florida, after he received two contract offers from the Bengals that didn’t contain “the guarantees past the first year he was looking for,” explained The Athletic’s Dianna Russini.
“No communication has taken place between my camp and the organization post-draft. The offers prior to the draft did not reflect the vision we shared and were promised last off-season if I continued to play at a high level,” wrote Hendrickson in a statement he provided to Adam Schefter two months ago. “Coaches are aware of these past conversations. Rather than using collaboration to get us to a point to bring me home to the team, THEY are no longer communicating. I have been eagerly awaiting a resolution of this situation, but that’s hard to do when there is no discussion and an evident lack of interest in reaching mutual goals.”
Yesterday, Bengals owner Mike Brown spoke with reporters at the team’s annual media luncheon. He said that the organization will not be trading Hendrickson because it plans on getting him signed soon.
“We aren’t going to trade Trey. We’re working to get Trey signed as we speak here,” Brown clarified. “There are guys over in the office working to get that done. I think it’ll get done. It is the way Trey can be. We like Trey as a person. He’s a good guy. But when it comes to these negotiations – and we’ve been through a few of them with him – he pushes hard. He gets emotional. We never have an easy time of it, but there’s one thing that is consistent: it always gets done. And I think this one will, but we’ll see. I’ve been proven wrong before, but I’m pretty confident that we’ll get there at the end.”
Long-term extension talks between the #Bengals and star Trey Hendrickson broke down over guaranteed money before camp… and Hendrickson has now indicated he left the state.
He just posted this on Instagram. pic.twitter.com/Le2aKris0t
— Ian Rapoport (@RapSheet) July 22, 2025
Duke Tobin, Cincinnati’s director of player personnel, echoed Brown’s sentiments. Though he did say that Hendrickson shouldn’t be skipping training camp.
“Trey’s an important part of our team. I’ve got tons of respect for him. He’s a great football player,” Tobin said at the Bengals media luncheon. “He’s under contract. We expect all of our guys under contract to be here. That’s just the way it is. He’s a guy that I’ve said before has earned a raise and an extension. I’d love to give him one. We’re trying to work one out… We would like to come to an agreement with him that satisfies him and fits with us.”
Either way, Mike Brown and Duke Tobin want Trey Hendrickson to be a long-term part of this organization.
“I want it done, and I think – to be honest – Trey wants it done, too,” Brown said. “He’s a football player. He’ll be highly-paid. He’ll make more than you make, more than I make. So, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for how that is, but he deserves a high-paying deal because he’s performed very well.”
ESPN analyst Peter Schrager made an appearance on The Pat McAfee Show earlier today to discuss Hendrickson’s contract negotiations as well as the ongoing talks the Bengals are having with 2025 NFL Draft pick Shemar Stewart.
“When you have Trey Hendrickson and then you draft a defensive end at 17th overall, those are pretty much your top two defensive players going into the season as far as what you have and what you hope for… And to not have either as camp starts is a major L,” Schrager said. “I don’t care how you look at it, who wins this thing. To not have either one of those guys on the first day of training camp is a huge, huge L for the team.”
EXCLUSIVE: Just spoke to Bengals pass rusher Trey Hendrickson, who is currently in Jacksonville, FL. For the last 30 days, he had been at his home in Cincinnati and training.
But as training camp approached, he and his wife decided to leave.
They received two offers in a… pic.twitter.com/evlSdeWlpK
— Dianna Russini (@DMRussini) July 22, 2025
“They are not going to do what he wants on his timetable, and they have made that clear,” Schrager added.
He also told Pat McAfee that he’s not a fan of how the Bengals have handled these negotiations. He argues that the damage being done by these contract talks undoes the good the team did earlier this off-season when they extended wide receivers Tee Higgins and Ja’Marr Chase.
“This is just brutal. It’s brutal because, for the entire off season, I’ve been saying – on this show and on others – the priorities for Cincinnati were Ja’Marr Chase and Tee Higgins,” he said. “When they got those deals done, they were like, ‘We did it. Right fans? Like, we did it. We finally did it. We broke the bank on two star players, and we are good to go.’ Then this Trey Hendrickson thing has completely taken any of the goodwill away from it. And then the Shamar Stewart thing comes out of left field when you start putting in clauses that they’ve never done as a team before. And that’s taken down the team. It puts you right back in the same conversation you were in when Carson Palmer was unhappy with his contracts, and when those early 2000s teams that were so good had to be dismantled because the team might have bungled the relationships.”
“I think three years ago, I began to ask for a long-term contract with guaranteed money, so those deadlines have kind of just all been a blur,” Hendrickson said in April. “I’ve just been hunting quarterbacks, so at this point it is what it is. I don’t know if I can put a time stamp on it… I would have been willing to sign three years ago, two years ago, and this year. It was communicated with me that we would get something done this year… I kind of treat it like a house now. Like, house values have gone up. It’s the cost of living, and in some ways, life continues to go forward. I know I’m a football player. I’m training to be the best Trey Hendrickson I can be and however that looks and whatever team, we can address that.”
