bolo said: The Bengals have taken chances on players with character issues. Some proved to huge mistakes. I do know Frostee Rucker had some pending charges when he was drafted. He has turned out to be one of the most active players in our community. So, to answer your question, they do take too many chances on troubled players, and I wish they wouldn’t, but some have really turned their life around.
BUT>>>Leon Hall was not a troubled player. He was everything we wanted in a first round pick. My point, the players for the Bengals and every other NFL are not trying out for the church choir. There is no way of knowing who is going to break the law in the future.

I will agree with all that you’re saying here. For some arrests (like Hall), there’s no signs of trouble and no way to see it coming. It’s hard to fault the team management in cases like that, because let’s face it – arrests are going to happen on every team.
With folks like, say, Chris Henry, it’s different, because of the warning signs before he was drafted. Like you said, this is a case where Bengals management took a risk. Sometimes risks payoff and sometimes they bite you. I think what caught a lot of people’s eye, and the main reason the Bengals are singled out when it comes to arrests is the number of risks they took, and the fact that after taking those risks, their number of arrests did in fact go up to the point where it was a problem. Now, like it or not, it’s a reputation they’re going to have to live with for awhile. They may have, in fact, turned the corner, but it takes a while to shake this kind of thing.
In my mind, Mike Brown is the source of this problem. I think he took risks he didn’t need to take, and I think the Bengals team chemistry has suffered as a result. After years and years of struggling to find a good QB to replace Boomer, they finally get one in Carson Palmer, and then they go and mess around with these risky picks and pickups. I would like to see them dump all of the issues and drama (even if they lose talent in the process) and get a cohesive group of players together and see where they can go with it.

bolo said: Still, to single out the Bengals for bad behavior is laughable.

You’ve got to be kidding.
Here are two huge reasons why the Bengals get singled out.
First Reason: The Bengals asked for this. They started playing with fire when they started drafting folks like Thurman and Henry. People with known character issues who, from a talent perspective would have been drafted much higher, but because of their character issues, they were still available. This raised a lot of eyebrows and got a lot of TV coverage the first evening of the draft, and rightfully so. I remember one analyst saying he could see possibly taking a chance with one of them, but never both, and all of the others at the table agreed. Later, Marvin Lewis himself indicated that this practice was a problem when he was lobbying for the Bengals to hire a GM.
Second Reason: The Bengals have had more arrests in the past 7 years than any other NFL team. When you’re at the top of a list of 32, I honestly have no idea how you can expect not to be singled out. Now, I understand that up until this most recent arrest, they had been doing better. But expecting one year’s worth of doing better to erase the 6 previous years of problems is “laughable”.
The thing that puzzles me most about all of this is the apparently high percentage of Bengals fans that passionately defend the Bengals when it comes to this topic. The Bengals are not my team, but if they were, you’d never, ever, see me lashing out at Florio or anyone else who points out these problems. My hatred would begin and end with one person: Mike Brown.

hitdog042 said: Big deal. I would imagine most people on here have a DUI or a Domestic Violence charge.

I hope you’re not being serious. DUI is a very big deal to anyone who’s had a family member killed or seriously injured by a drunk driver.

bondem777 said: It’s the first arrest since 2007. How many other teams can say the same?

Wasn’t Chris Henry arrested and then released from the team in 2008?