THE BROO VIEW with Ken Broo

Chris Henry, spending the night as the guest of Kenton County, Kentucky. Mister Henry, you'll be in the third cell to your right.

A judge in Kentucky put Henry behind bars for 90-days today and then cut that to only two days in jail. And while so light a sentence in real time is interesting, so too were the judge's words to Henry, calling him a 'cancer' on the team and telling Henry he may have cost his teammates their only shot at playing in a Super Bowl.

It was the kind of talk, caught on camera by news photographers in the greater Cincinnati area, that should have been delivered to Henry by his head coach, Marvin Lewis. Maybe it was. Lewis never reveals what he says to any of his players. But he should have made an exception with regards to Henry. What he did started the Bengals down into the legal abyss that nuked their season.

What if Lewis had revealed what he said in private to Henry. Would it not have served as a warning alarm to the rest of that locker room? And what if some one of the other legal offenders who followed Henry to the local police stations this year had heard what Marvin said and were deterred from breaking the law themselves? Would not that have been considered as big a coaching maneuver as any touchdown play? We'll never know.

But we know this. Lewis and the Bengals can't help themselves. The day Marvin promised to get tougher and go back to the kind of disciplinarian he was when he first arrived here, the same day he said that, Lewis went out and signed a free agent who spent almost 300 days in jail for assault and robbery.