Cincinnati Starter Geno Stone Posts Cryptic Message Possibly Tied To Bengals Future

CINCINNATI — Geno Stone appeared to be posting a goodbye message to the Bengals on Friday night. The veteran safety and star for the team over the past two seasons posted a photo of himself in uniform on X with the caption of just a peace sign emoji.

Stone has been one of the most embattled players on the team over the past two years. He's notched 53.1 and 54.3 Pro Football Focus grades over his two years in Cincinnati and has not lived up to the level of play he displayed to start his career in Baltimore.

He missed a team-high 23 tackles this past season and was second behind Germaine Pratt in 2024 with 17 missed tackles. Add in a 110.4 NFL passer rating allowed in his coverage area this season (16 points higher than in 2024), and you get a spot Cincinnati could upgrade through free agency or the draft.

"It comes down to certain situations where people aren't in the right spot, and that's what it came down to," Stone said at his locker after the Bengals loss to the Steelers on Nov. 16. "But I think overall, we played better. I'll say that we played better. I mean, definitely still got to tackle better, myself included, but we definitely played better."

Stone has played a whopping 2,114 snaps in Cincinnati over the past two seasons, and it looks likely that number won't increase at this rate.

"We were satisfied that we were maintaining clear, top-of-the-league players," Bengals director of player personnel said about the 2025 roster construction that left them with a terrible defense. "We have clear, elite, elite, world-class, best-in-the-world players on this football team.

"That’s one of the reasons we have high expectations. We didn’t want to lose that. We wanted continuity to build off of. Did we build off of it enough? Was the defense up to it enough? Obviously, it wasn’t. That falls on me. We did at the time what we thought would produce for us."

Check out the post from Stone below:

✌🏾 pic.twitter.com/sLeHvQfWal
— Geno Stone (@GenoStone22) January 24, 2026

For more on the Bengals, subscribe to our YouTube Channel and watch the video below as part of our in-depth coverage of the team. Prefer to listen? Check out Cincinnati Bengals Talk on Apple, Spotify, and Amazon Podcasts.

Make sure you bookmark BengalsTalk.com for the latest Bengals news, exclusive interviews, insight, film breakdowns and so much more!

Also, check out the podcast, Locked On Bengals, wherever you get your podcasts.

Apple: bit.ly/BengalsApple

Spotify: bit.ly/BengalsSpotify

YouTube: bit.ly/LOBengalsYouTube

-----

Follow us on X: @BengalsTalkSI

Like Our Facebook Page

Follow on TikTok