Cincinnati Bengals: Roster cut predictions, Defense

Linebackers

* = starter; + = roster spot; x = suspended

x Vontaze Burfict
* Vincent Rey
* Nick Vigil
* Kevin Minter
+ Jordan Evans
+ Hardy Nickerson
Paul Dawson
Bryson Albright
Brandon Bell

Having Burfict unable to play for three games because of suspension opens up a shot for more of these young linebackers to catch on. With no Burfict, Rey should join onto the starting group of Vigil and Minter.

I personally haven’t seen anything to believe Vigil is worthy of the starting role (or any role, really; his rookie year was awfully poor from everything I’ve seen), but apparently the Bengals are plenty high on him so he’ll at least get the go-ahead to start off 2017. If he doesn’t impress, the team could always send him to the bench upon Burfict’s return (currently, it appears Rey will be the one who is designated for that eventuality).

Five non-Burfict linebackers feels sort of low, especially with only two having any sort of decent sample size of positive production, but there’s a simple explanation for this: the talent of this group overall is much shallower than what other position groups have found. And it would be smarter to keep the better players elsewhere rather than just hold onto players here for the sake of numbers. Injuries could exacerbate things, sure, but that could be said about any position group. Keeping worse talents simply because that may happen would be poor roster management.

That being said, there is only so thin you want to go at any slot regardless of the guys available to you, and keeping just two backups on a 4-3 base defense for a three-week stretch is probably the thinnest a team would be comfortable with.

Evans was going to make it regardless because he actually has shown off talent — his coaches have talked him up in recent weeks because of it. Soon, he may find himself in a role much like Rey’s will be when Burfict returns (oft-used subpackage LB). If things break a certain way, he could even be the guy Cincinnati uses to replace Burfict (assuming they actually do, of course; with his contract up after 2017 and his history of personal fouls/fines/suspensions, seeing him let go could be in their best interest).

The real question here is who gets that fifth spot? None of these guys have really stood out, but in essentially a four-way coin toss Nickerson seems to be a slightly better choice than the others.