Bengals Edge Rusher Returns to Practice Following Month-Long Injury

Shemar Stewart is back at practice for the Bengals!

ESPN's Ben Baby noted his return to the field as he continues to recover from a knee hyperextension that the second-year player suffered during the opening week of training camp.

Bengals head coach Zac Taylor stated then the injury would take several weeks to heal. He now returns after a little over a month away with a bevy of practices to get under his belt and ready for the season opener against Tampa Bay.

"He fortunately avoided major injury," Taylor said in July. "He hyperextended his knee; it will be several weeks. It's hard to pinpoint exactly how much of training camp that will be."

The injury took place on Stewart’s second rep of team drills during that rough day. Stewart got mixed up with now-released backup offensive lineman Cody Ford as the Texas A&M product fell to the ground. The left knee went awry on him, but he was in full pads on Wednesday and doing normal drills.

"Very fortunate, because it obviously looked bad. The good news is we'll be getting him back sooner rather than later," Taylor said.

Both Ja'Marr Chase and Tee Higgins still aren't practicing as Cincinnati has one more practice tomorrow before a few days off ahead of Week 1.

Taylor is ready to see what his team can do at the beginning of the season. He noted Stewart would be on the rehab field this week, but he's already making great progress on that front.

"Well, I think we put in really good work. I feel good about that part of it," Taylor said about training camp. "That won't mean anything beyond this first game. We've got to go out there and have a great plan, and we got to understand the plan, and we got to be able to execute it. We've got to be able to put guys in positions to make the plays, because nobody's going to care after this first game how training camp went. We just got to put ourselves in position to win.

"So, I feel like we covered a lot of the things that that we set out to cover. So we checked those boxes. Now we've got to check the right (game boxes). Do we have a great plan in place, and are we putting our guys in a position to go execute it, so that we can start 1-0?"

Check out a video of Stewart below from WLWT's Jaron May:

Shemar Stewart is in pads and participating in unit drills for the first time since his opening day knee hypertension.@WLWT pic.twitter.com/yRYSLiNmFJ
— Jaron May (@jaron_may) September 2, 2026

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