Eric Winston is back with the Bengals. The team announced that they have signed the offensive tackle. To make room, fellow tackle Jake Fisher has been moved to the NFI/Reserve list, ending his 2017 season. 
Winston, the president of the NFLPA, was released by the Bengals in early September. The Bengals, at the time, were looking to kickstart a youth movement on the offensive line with the likes of Cedric Ogbuehi and Jake Fisher as the club’s starting tackles with youngsters such as Christian Westerman and J.J. Dielman in support. With needs on the offensive line midway through the season, they’re bringing him back to the fold.
Winston was with the Bengals from the end of the 2014 season all the way through 2016. In total, he appeared in 33 games with six starts.
Meanwhile, the team has yet to disclose Fisher’s illness.
“He’s (dealt with this) as we’ve been going through the season,” head coach Marvin Lewis said recently (via Jay Morrison of the Dayton Daily News). “It’s something that the doctors are monitoring very closely. (Sunday) they thought they needed to pull him from the game and run some tests, so they took him to the hospital to run tests. It’s not as serious as I would think it is, yet, it took him out of the game.”
What are the rules that govern how long a player can be a “player rep” when he isn’t playing? Winston isn’t the first NFLPA president to be unemployed for a time while serving, but could he technically have kept the job indefinitely if he hadn’t been signed, as long as he didn’t file retirement papers? Just curious if anyone knows.