Veteran offensive tackle Trent Brown signed a one-year contract with the Cincinnati Bengals on Tuesday, the team announced.
Brown (6-foot-8, 370 pounds) will pair with Orlando Brown Jr. (6-8, 345 pounds) to give the Bengals bookend tackles to protect star quarterback Joe Burrow.
The last team to have a pair of starting tackles that were at least 6-8 and 345 pounds was the 2009-10 Minnesota Vikings (left tackle Bryant McKinnie and right tackle Phil Loadholt), according to ESPN Stats & Information.
The Bengals had a vacancy on their offensive line after offensive tackle Jonah Williams agreed to a contract with the Arizona Cardinals last week.
Trent Brown said during a media availability Tuesday that fit and enjoying coming to work each day were two big factors that led him to sign with the Bengals. He told reporters he saw Bengals center Ted Karras, his former teammate with the New England Patriots, sitting in the hot tub in the Bengals’ facility, which spoke volumes about Cincinnati’s culture.
“That was a huge thing right there,” Brown said. “Just being where we came from, where people would get out of there for a release any chance we had.”
Brown also said not having to worry about “off-the-field things” will help him get back to the Pro Bowl form he showed in 2019 as a member of the Las Vegas Raiders.
“I’ll be able to just enjoy coming to work on a day-to-day basis,” said Brown, who declined to go into specifics when asked about it. “And that was important as well when we talk about fit.”
Brown enters his 10th NFL season and has played in 100 career regular-season games, with 93 starts. He has started 51 games at right tackle and 42 at left tackle.
Brown had been playing at a high level at left tackle for the Patriots last season before injuring his ankle in an Oct. 22 win over the Buffalo Bills and then attempting to play through it the next week in a loss to the Miami Dolphins. He started only one more game the remainder of the season, having fallen out of favor, while publicly expressing his displeasure with the organization.
Brown’s best season as a pro came in 2018 with the Patriots, when he started every game at left tackle during a Super Bowl championship season. He parlayed that into a four-year, $66 million free agent contract with the Raiders, but, after two injury-filled seasons, Las Vegas traded him back to New England in 2021.
Brown, who entered the NFL as a seventh-round draft choice of the San Francisco 49ers in 2015, will turn 31 on April 13.
ESPN’s Jeremy Fowler, Ben Baby and Mike Reiss contributed to this report.
