CINCINNATI – The second play of 11-on-11 drills told you more about where this franchise is than any depth chart released this month.
Ja’Marr Chase and cornerback D.J. Turner II went at each other during Wednesday’s opening practice of 2026 training camp at the Bengals’ facility in Cincinnati. Slot corner Jalen Davis got pulled into it too. Teammates separated them before anything traveled further. And then Chase, speaking to reporters afterward, described what had just happened in his own vocabulary.
“Just gotta come out and be aggressive,” Chase said. “Coming out with some anger underneath us.”
That phrase, anger underneath, is the most accurate description of where the Bengals are entering this season. They went 6-11 last year. Joe Burrow arrived this summer as a quarterback entering his seventh professional year, ranked 44th on the league’s Top 100 list, playing for a franchise that has not surrounded him with a complete roster since the year they reached the Super Bowl. Camp opening with a scuffle in competitive drills was not a distraction. It was the first sign that someone in Cincinnati showed up in July with something they cannot afford to set aside.
Turner’s own read, offered to reporters after the session, was six words: “Brothers fight all the time. Nothing else to it.”
Chase, once the initial intensity settled, reached for something more specific. “Everybody just getting each other better at the end of the day,” he told reporters, per Sports Illustrated. “I play with a lot of feistiness under me. Help those guys get better.”
The receiver’s record in this area is not in question. Chase arrived in Cincinnati four years ago as the kind of talent that reorders a franchise’s expectations, and the years between the Super Bowl run and now have not moved his investment in individual reps. What changed between 2021 and 2025 was everything around him: the offensive line depth, the defensive personnel, the continuity of a supporting cast that a quarterback playing like one of the best ten in the league deserved and rarely got.
Across the league this week, training camp sessions have carried their own particular weight. In Pittsburgh, Aaron Rodgers is working through limited reps at what he has called his final NFL training camp, threading passes with precision that has left the skeptics in Latrobe searching for different arguments. In Buffalo, Josh Allen and the Bills opened camp with the pointed intensity of a team that finished second in the AFC East last season and intends to do something about it. In Cincinnati, the urgency arrived on the second play of 11-on-11 drills, before any coaching staff member had to manufacture it.
What Chase expressed in that drill, and in the conversation with reporters afterward, is the version of Bengals training camp that head coach Zac Taylor needs to see translate from July to September. Taylor’s job security tracks more directly against this season’s results than any previous summer. The speculation about the coaching staff’s future, including national media predictions of a potential Bengals coaching change in 2027, is the kind of ambient pressure that a 6-11 record makes inescapable. What Taylor is working to build in these early sessions is a team that carries Wednesday’s competitive edge into week three of the regular season, not just week three of training camp.
The same session that produced the Chase altercation also produced the Bengals’ most concrete setback. Shemar Stewart, the defensive end the team selected 17th overall in the 2025 draft, hyperextended his left knee on the second play of team drills and was carted off the field. By the time Taylor addressed the media, the initial assessment was in. “Shemar hyperextended his knee. Will miss several weeks,” Taylor said, per Sports Illustrated. “Good news is he avoided a major injury.”
Reports indicated no ligament damage had been sustained. Stewart’s recovery timeline, Taylor suggested, leaves room for him to be available before Cincinnati opens the regular season September 13 against Tampa Bay.
The timeline is realistic. The circumstances are not ideal. Stewart played only eight games in his rookie year, hampered by a contract holdout and an earlier knee problem that limited his spring work. He arrived at this camp as a player whose professional development had been interrupted twice before it properly started. Losing several weeks of summer contact work compounds a situation that needed every available rep.
With Stewart sidelined, the Bengals will rely on Boye Mafe as the lead edge rusher, Myles Murphy on the opposite side, and Cashious Howell as the first defensive end off the bench. That group is capable. Whether it is the defense this team needs when the AFC North races begin in October is not something Taylor can resolve in the last week of July.
What Wednesday offered was a single, accurate data point: a team that opened camp with heat. Chase made it real on the second play of 11-on-11. Turner answered in six words. Stewart went down on a cart before the session was half over. All of it happened on Day 1, before the first padded practice, before any of the competition that actually matters had begun.
What it means for a franchise entering its seventh year with Burrow at quarterback, one of the most talented receivers in the game, and a defensive line that just lost its highest-profile piece for the start of camp is not something the Bengals can resolve in July. The anger underneath, as Chase put it, will need to still be there when the AFC North schedule runs through Cincinnati in November.
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