McKinnley Jackson may have walked into Bengals camp with the kind of opening most young defensive tackles dream about, only to watch the picture change fast.
A year after Cincinnati spent a third-round pick on Jackson, the team’s interior line has been reshaped by two huge additions: T.J. Slaton and Dexter Lawrence.
That leaves Jackson fighting to stay out of the roster bubble, even though the path he was supposed to take once D.J. Reader left in free agency looked much clearer not long ago.
Lawrence changes everything for this defense. The real question now is who backs him up when he needs a breather, and Jackson has a real chance to force his way into that conversation.
ESPN’s Ben Baby recently left Jackson off his Bengals 53-man roster projection, instead listing Dexter Lawrence, Jonathan Allen, B.J. Hill, T.J. Slaton, Kris Jenkins Jr. and Landon Robinson at defensive tackle.
That’s not exactly a soft landing for Jackson. But the case for him is simple: he’s a 330-pound nose tackle with a defined job, and there just aren’t many bodies built like that.
If Lawrence were to go down, Cincinnati would want insurance. Jackson gives them that kind of size and, at minimum, a player who can make camp more complicated than expected.
There’s also the matter of how the rest of the depth chart shakes out. Jenkins, Jackson’s draft classmate, has been viewed as a possible tweener - not quite a true nose tackle and not dynamic enough as a 3-technique.
Rookie Landon Robinson, meanwhile, looks like the more obvious interior pass-rush threat. Jackson doesn’t have that kind of ambiguity.
His role is clear.
And then there’s the money.
The Bengals have invested heavily in Slaton and Jackson, but the gap between the two could become the key roster question. Slaton was brought in to help fix the run defense, yet Cincinnati finished dead last against the run, and he ranked 108th out of 130 qualifying interior defensive linemen in PFF’s run-defense grades with a 41.1 mark. Jackson, in a much smaller sample of 60 snaps, posted a 63.8 grade against the run.
That doesn’t automatically make Jackson the better player. Slaton also had three sacks last season, which points to a different kind of value.
But Jackson’s case is built on more than numbers. He spent much of last season as a healthy scratch, alongside fellow third-round pick Jermaine Burton, and still kept grinding until he got some run late in the year.
That kind of response matters.
The Bengals may not love the idea of admitting a free-agent miss with Slaton, but the math is hard to ignore. If Jackson can stack a few splash plays in camp, he could make the front office think twice before moving on. And if Cincinnati decides to go cheaper behind Lawrence, it could free up almost $8 million for another addition.
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