Orlando Brown Jr.<\/a> said he was sold right then.<\/p>\n“The real test in terms of his character came when he lined up against the Cleveland Browns and had been here maybe less than a week, and he shows up and plays at a high level, Brown said. “He barely knew our names. High character, high value football player who loves the game and brings great energy to our room.”<\/p>\n
That’s not the half of how Risner survived the opener. As agent Drew Rosenhaus sought a deal, he worked out in Parrish, Fla., at his home in what he calls a retirement community. He never stepped into a gym, preferring to carry his cleats to the lone patch of grass on the place, where he says the retirees took their dogs to relieve themselves.<\/p>\n
“I’m asking myself the question. The NFL doesn’t want me every year. Free agency doesn’t go my way,” Risner said. “Every year I find a way to start, and every year I can’t get a team to take a shot.”<\/p>\n
And there was the day a man walked by the mailboxes in front of the patch of grass and said, “You’re in a hell of a fantasy football league, aren’t you?”<\/p>\n
“It was funny, but also devastating, because I’m actually training in the NFL. An NFL football player,” Risner said. “I don’t blame them for thinking this, but it’s so cool to think back to all that work, and it paid off. Because when I showed up here, I thought I was going to have three or four weeks before I was really going to be put in the fold.<\/p>\n
“But I was mentally and physically ready because all the work that I did, and I never once gave up or skipped the day and said, hey, this isn’t what I’m going to do.”<\/p>\n
There he was, suddenly in the game in the second quarter. It probably helped he wasn’t around the previous nine months to hear how much they needed to win their first opener in four years. It was complicated by a road crowd, forcing him to look back for the silent count.<\/p>\n
“I felt like I was on that little patch of grass avoiding dog poop eight days prior, and then I was at the Dawg Pound and looking at Myles Garrett across from me. So I said, ‘Man, this is a pretty big switch, but this is what I’ve been born to do,'” Risner said. “I was shocked. I didn’t think I was going to get in the game. I was an emergency guard, and I think I was a sixth offensive lineman when we got in the goal-line package. But those are the moments that I take pride in because not everyone could have been prepared for that moment.<\/p>\n
“There was a whole playbook to be learned. Joe Burrow doesn’t really care how long you’ve been somewhere. Joe Burrow is going to call it how he calls it. He’s going to use audibles and different snap counts, and he’s going to do things the way he does things. And he expected me to know it, and I’m glad I did.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For Openers Karras isn’t the only guy impressed with what Risner pulled off on Opening Day in Cleveland.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":788760,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2053],"tags":[103558,228,443,227,256,2296,758,7,4609,1843,81,898,6,13906],"class_list":["post-788759","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cincinnati-bengals","tag-2026-free-agency","tag-bengals","tag-centerpiece","tag-cincinnati","tag-cincinnati-bengals","tag-cincinnatibengals","tag-dalton-risner","tag-football","tag-free-agency","tag-hobson","tag-latest-news","tag-latest-stories","tag-nfl","tag-quick-hits"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/116164661414033323","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/788759","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=788759"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/788759\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/788760"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=788759"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=788759"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=788759"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}