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On Monday, Jack Kiser, self-described “history geek,” rattled three hours on the train from London to Stonehenge and back a few mystical millennia to view the sublime super structure.
“It’s 30,000 tons of stones standing up and stacked on top of each other,” Kiser is saying this whirlwind Wednesday. “And the stones aren’t even from that area; they’re from different islands. And it’s like, how in the world did they get there?”
On Tuesday, Kiser could have been asking himself the exact same thing as the newest Bengal shot the A gap and landed in Cincinnati at dinner time.
Welcome to a life dangling by the NFL waiver wire.
Actually, Kiser had a pretty good idea how he got here because he knew that Paycor Stadium would be no Alcatraz. Three of his coaches at Notre Dame waited, as well as his old college roommate from South Bend.
And there was the weather.
“When I landed here, one of the first things I noticed was the trees are changing colors a little bit. So that’s pretty cool to experience that again,” Kiser says. “Last year when it was Christmas and 80 degrees, it was a little weird. So I’m glad to be back in the Midwest.”
Kiser, waiting to play in a game for the first time this season, is here because Bengals backup linebacker Swayze Bozeman banged into a leg during Sunday’s special teams scrum in Miami and broke his forearm. The day before and after their Saturday walkthrough in London, the Jaguars cut Kiser to get the roster ready for their game against the Eagles. With the Jags staying the UK for another game, he sensed the plan was to re-sign him to the practice squad Monday after he cleared waivers.
But Kiser didn’t know that until he got back to the hotel from Stonehenge Monday at 10 p.m., 5 p.m. back in New York, where the waiver wire had already unfurled. He had to wait Saturday, Sunday, Monday with his wife back in Jacksonville expecting their first child in the spring, his car still parked at the Jaguars facility, his life on hold.
“Where is my baby going to be born?” became a sudden, disconcerting thought.
He just had to get out of the hotel. Saturday night he went to the next town over for dinner. A big Ted Lasso fan, Kiser on Sunday journeyed a little farther to Richmond to catch some familiar scenes. Monday was Stonehenge. A World War II junkie, Kiser had already visited the Winston Churchill war rooms on previous trips to London.
“The Jags were really good to me. They made sure I was eating every meal and not to be afraid to be around the team,” Kiser says. “But at the same time, I couldn’t be at any required designated team event.
“This whole process has been really eye-opening and changes your perspective. When you know your team that you’re playing for all of a sudden is going to a game on Sunday and you don’t get to tag along, right? And then all of a sudden you’re moving homes, and you’re in the new city, and you’re learning new teammates’ names. It’s all a process and it’s not for the weak, I can tell you that.”
What makes it easier is that the guy who was The Indianapolis Star’s Mr. Football of 2018, grew up about four hours from Paycor on his family farm in Royal Center, Ind., and his folks can now drive to games. Even closer, he has a sibling in Indianapolis. Even closer are relatives on the eastern fringe of Cincinnati in Anderson Township, where his uncle is a Turpin High School administrator.
“It’s just really cool to be back around family and people that you know really care about Jack Kiser,” he says.
Even closer? He was born 26 years ago on the day Paycor hosted its first NFL regular-season game. It was at Paycor where his name wouldn’t stay on the waiver wire.
Not with his old Notre Dame defensive coordinator Al Golden now running the Bengals defense. Not with his senior analyst on defense in South Bend, Ronnie Regula, now the Bengals assistant linebackers coach. Not with Mike Moon, his college linebacker G.A., now roaming the Bengals defensive line.
Not only that, he’s never stopped texting his college roomie Isaiah Foskey, a defensive end on the Bengals practice squad. And practice squad defensive tackle Howard Cross III, another Golden Domer, put him in a group chat with “Dude, welcome to the team,” even before he met the coaches.
“Maybe you don’t sign me because I don’t have any film yet, and I think that maybe the Jaguars were kind of counting on that maybe a little bit,” Kiser says. “I think it helped a lot that there were guys in the building here that knew who I was and what that player is.
What the Bengals know is that they need a vet backup linebacker they can plug in on teams who is smart and tough and committed.
And they also know that Kiser is all these things as a historic figure himself. While getting a master’s degree at Notre Dame, he became the first player in the storied program of Gipp and Rockne and Ara to play in 70 games while helping lead Golden’s defense into the 2024 national title game.
