Mike Gesicki Camp Update — August 31: Five Tight Ends Kept Around Him
2026 NFL Season · Monday, Aug 31
Mike Gesicki made Cincinnati's initial fifty-three-man roster in a five-man tight end room: Gesicki, Drew Sample, Tanner Hudson, Erick All Jr. and rookie Jack Endries. The starters sat the finale, and no reporting describes All's workload in it.
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Cincinnati kept five tight ends, and Mike Gesicki is one of them. The initial 53 carries Gesicki, Drew Sample, Tanner Hudson, Erick All Jr. and seventh-round rookie Jack Endries, per Geoff Hobson at the team's site, with Cam Grandy and Josh Kattus waived — Kattus's cut reported ahead of the announcement by Heltman, citing Tom Pelissero. Endries arrived at cut day as a named camp standout, headlining Hobson's pre-cut roster piece alongside camp stars Dohnte Meyers and Landon Robinson, and he was one of all seven of the team's 2026 draft picks to make the roster.
A week ago we framed the cutdown as a squeeze on this room. It wasn't — nobody Gesicki was competing with got squeezed out except two names below him, and the team chose to carry five, one of its biggest position groups. What five tight ends means, the reporting doesn't say, and we won't assign it a meaning: it can read as a team that values the position or simply as a crowded room. The second thing we said we'd watch — whether All's workload kept growing in the finale — has no answer at all. The starters rested Friday's 30 to 13 win at Philadelphia, per the team's site, and no reachable account of the game describes All's usage or names him. That's a gap in the record, not evidence in either direction.
For a first-time listener, the June read was that tight end targets are sticky but capped for Gesicki in an offense built around two star receivers, with Noah Fant's departure a small tailwind and All's return the one real threat to his snaps. A week ago the threat became a participant; this week the room added a second young body instead of removing one, which sharpens the competition question without settling it. The other item in this offense this week — Ja'Marr Chase's slightly hyperextended left knee, per Russell Heltman at Bengals On SI — sits next to all of this, and no reporting connects it to anyone else's targets, so neither will we. We'll check back once real snaps start sorting the room out.
_Data via nflverse._
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