"Antonio Bryant wasn't a mistake. A mistake is ordering scrambled eggs when you wanted poached. It's driving to Los Angeles, via I-95. Paying someone $6.95 million for nothing is a colossal blunder of the highest magnitude. Even in the NFL.

Bryant cost the corner store that is the Cincinnati Bengals a lot of money. More, his case shone the light, again, on what ails this franchise, even as it heads with optimism into the season. Mike Brown's way with dollars costs him more cash than it saves. Bryant wasn't the first example of that, only the latest.

There is also the sad case of Rashad Jeanty. More about that momentarily.

The Bengals signed Bryant in March. They guaranteed him $8 million, even as he had well-documented knee problems. The Bengals medical staff examined him, evidently, before the deal. We say "evidently" because details on what exactly occurred between team doctors and Bryant has not been made public. A call Monday to one of the team's physicians, Dr. Angelo Colosimo, was not returned.

The Bengals X-rayed Bryant's leg. That's great, but he hadn't broken anything. Bryant had cartilage problems. Did the Bengals doctors give Bryant an MRI? That would reveal knee damage. An MRI would seem a logical test to run on a player with a bad knee, whose livelihood depends on cutting, starting and stopping.

Did the Bengals do an MRI?

Bryant's knee never got better. He limped through offseason workouts (for a $250,000 bonus) and tried to practice once in July. The Bengals terminated his contract Sunday.

How does a professional sports organization worth close to $1 billion not do a thorough exam on an employee with a bad knee who, you know, runs for a living?

As for Jeanty, he broke his leg during Cincinnati's playoff game in January with the New York Jets. He also suffered ligament damage in his ankle, but the Bengals doctors somehow missed that small detail. Jeanty's agent, David Canter, said his client was close to signing a three-year deal with Miami in March when he failed the Dolphins physical because of the ankle injury the Bengals didn't find.

He signed a one-year deal with the Bengals on March 25 and had surgery on March 31, only to fail his physical this week and be waived Monday.

"The only reason Rashad failed the physical today is because he did not have a doctor tell him he needed surgery last January," Canter claimed Monday. "The original diagnosis wasn't complete."

Wait. When the Bengals examined Jeanty's leg immediately after the break, they didn't discover his ankle was injured, too? Isn't the ankle part of the leg? "They never looked down there," Canter claimed."