The little that has crept out about the injury to Cincinnati Bengals guard Clint Boling hasn’t sounded good.
Boling has spent most of the offseason with some mystery ailment that ended up holding him out of OTAs. Given that he was arguably the team’s best offensive lineman last year, it’s a serious problem.
According to Paul Dehner Jr. of The Athletic, the Bengals are still working on trying to nail the problem and its solutions down:
I’ve been told the club is still trying to get a handle on Boling’s injury. Considering he has been sidelined with an undisclosed issue throughout the offseason program, none of that sounds very good. Such news doesn’t mean the club is clueless about what’s going on, just essentially, it’s complicated.
As Dehner notes, speculation about this sort of topic isn’t fun — and that is part of the reason the Bengals were so quick to announce the Jonah Williams surgery and return timetable after initially treating it in a vague manner.
With Boling, it complicates matters on the line further. Cordy Glenn is back to left tackle and there is a question mark at guard next to him if Boling can’t go. Does it go to Christian Westerman? Or new arrival John Jerry (whose recent signing was always about Boling, not Williams).
And on a personal level, Boling, 30 years old, enters a contract year before becoming a free agent.
Given the layers here, it isn’t hard to see why this is a slow-developing story. But it has been building for a long time now and the end result could have a big impact in several different ways.
