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Looking for more big plays out of their safeties Leighton Vander Esch Jersey , the Bengals drafted one who learned to track balls in the air while playing center field on high school fields in neighboring Indiana.

Jessie Bates III even hit a few home runs, too.

Cincinnati traded down in the second round of the draft Friday and focused on a defense that slipped last season, taking Bates III from Wake Forest with the 46th overall pick. They kept at it in the third round, picking defensive end Sam Hubbard from Ohio State and linebacker Malik Jefferson from Texas.

They added to all three levels of the defense 鈥?line, linebacker and secondary 鈥?in a one-day flurry.

"We did a lot in the early part of the offseason with our offense," coach Marvin Lewis said. "We wanted to address the defense today. That was our plan, and we were able to stick to it."

First, they went for a safety who has man-to-man coverage skills and a knack for being around the ball. He honed that skill while playing center field at Snider High School in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He also was a point guard on the basketball team.

"Baseball is the same thing: track the ball off the bat," Bates said in a conference call. "It's the same thing as reading the quarterback, reading his eyes. Basketball helped with that as well, with the anticipation, being able to read things, knowing how other players are thinking."

The Bengals could see how it translated.

"Kids that play baseball have a phenomenal feel for looking over the shoulder and tracking balls either way, and he can do that," safeties coach Robert Livingston said.

The Bengals had only 11 interceptions last season, tied for 10th-fewest in the league. Their safeties combined for three. Cornerback Darqueze Dennard led the team with two.

It was part of an overall slide by the defense, which finished 18th in yards allowed and 30th against the run. Coordinator Paul Guenther left to join Jon Gruden with the Raiders, and Teryl Austin was hired as his replacement. Austin ran a similar defense in Detroit, so Cincinnati won't have to make a significant change in its schemes.

One thing that Austin wants is more turnovers out of his new defense. Bates is known for it. He had nine interceptions as a high school senior Roquan Smith Bears Jersey , and five 鈥?including two for touchdowns 鈥?at Wake Forest in 2016. He had one interception last season, when he was in more man-to-man coverage.

Bates recalled his interview with the Bengals at the NFL combine, which included several math problems as part of the mental drills.

"I'm not sure what their philosophy was behind that, but I killed it," Bates said. "I don't know if it was about quick-thinking or what."

The Bengals have acquired three players from within driving distance 鈥?two from Ohio State 鈥?during the first two days of the draft.

They chose Ohio State center Billy Price in the first round on Thursday, a move to fix their biggest problem. The offense finished last in the league last season and has been the main focus of their offseason. Price grew up in eastern Ohio and was hoping to stay in-state in the pros.

They hit home with Hubbard, who grew up in Cincinnati and has regularly attended games at Paul Brown Stadium, including the Bengals' playoff loss to Pittsburgh in 2005 when Carson Palmer tore up his knee on his first pass attempt.

Five years ago, Hubbard had committed to playing lacrosse at Notre Dame when Ohio State coach Urban Meyer decided to recruit him. During the process, Lewis happened to be in Columbus talking to Meyer when Hubbard called the Ohio State coach. Meyer put Lewis on the phone, knowing the impact it would make.

"That was a great recruiting tool," Hubbard said.

Hubbard didn't think there was much chance he'd end up playing for his favorite NFL team.

"I watched every game the Bengals played," he said. "When they were blacked out on Sunday, I was really upset."

College dropout Wayne Huizenga started with a trash hauling company, struck gold during America's brief love affair with VHS tapes and eventually owned three professional sports teams.

Huizenga owned Blockbuster Entertainment, AutoNation and the world's largest trash hauler, and was founding owner of baseball's Florida Marlins and the NHL Florida Panthers. He bought the NFL Miami Dolphins for $138 million in 1994.

The one thing he never got was a Super Bowl win.

Huizenga died late Thursday, according to Valerie Hinkell, his longtime assistant. He was 80.

"No one was a bigger Dolphin fan," Pro Football Hall of Fame coach Don Shula said in a statement Friday. "And no one wanted to see the team win more than he did. He supported the team in every way possible Cheap M.J. Stewart Jersey , and no one could have asked to work for a better owner."

The Marlins won the 1997 World Series, and the Panthers reached the Stanley Cup Final in 1996, but Huizenga's beloved Dolphins never reached a Super Bowl while he owned the team.

"If I have one disappointment, the disappointment would be that we did not bring a championship home," Huizenga said shortly after he sold the Dolphins to New York real estate billionaire Stephen Ross, who still owns the team. "It's something we failed to do."

Huizenga earned an almost cult-like following among business investors who watched him build Blockbuster Entertainment into the leading video rental chain by snapping up competitors. He cracked Forbes' list of the 100 richest Americans, becoming chairman of Republic Services, one of the nation's top waste management companies, and AutoNation, the nation's largest automotive retailer.

"You just have to be in the right place at the right time," he said. "It can only happen in America."

For a time, Huizenga was also a favorite with South Florida sports fans, drawing cheers and autograph seekers in public. The crowd roared when he danced the hokey pokey on the field during an early Marlins game. He went on a spending spree to build a veteran team that won the World Series in only the franchise's fifth year.

But his popularity plummeted when he ordered the roster dismantled after that season. He was frustrated by poor attendance and his failure to swing a deal for a new ballpark built with taxpayer money.

Many South Florida fans never forgave him for breaking up the championship team. Huizenga drew boos when introduced at Dolphins quarterback Dan Marino's retirement celebration in 2000, and kept a lower public profile after that.

In 2009, Huizenga said he regretted ordering the Marlins' payroll purge.

"We lost $34 million the year we won the World Series, and I just said, 'You know what, I'm not going to do that,'" Huizenga recalled. "If I had it to do over again, I'd say Ed Dickson Jersey Seahawks , 'OK, we'll go one more year.'"

He sold the Marlins in 1999 to John Henry, and sold the Panthers in 2001, unhappy with rising NHL player salaries and the stock price for the team's public company.

Huizenga's first sports love was the Dolphins 鈥?he had been a season-ticket holder since their inaugural season in 1966. But he fared better in the NFL as a businessman than as a sports fan.

He turned a nifty profit by selling the Dolphins and their stadium for $1.1 billion, nearly seven times what he paid to become sole owner. But he knew the bottom line in the NFL is championships, and his Dolphins perennially came up short.

Huizenga earned a reputation as a hands-off owner and won raves from many loyal employees, even though he made six coaching changes. He eased Shula into retirement in early 1996, and Jimmy Johnson, Dave Wannstedt, interim coach Jim Bates, Nick Saban, Cam Cameron and Tony Sparano followed as coach.

In 2008, Huizenga's final season as owner, the Dolphins had a turnaround year and won the AFC East on the final day of the regular season.

"It was a magical feeling," Huizenga said. "I had tears in my eyes. I kept looking away so I wouldn't have to wipe my eyes in front of everybody."

Miami lost in the first round of the playoffs and didn't return to the postseason until 2016. But Huizenga won praise from such disparate personalities as Shula, Johnson, Saban and Marlins manager Jim Leyland even when they no longer worked for him.

"The classiest man I ever met," Saban said in a statement Friday.

Harry Wayne Huizenga was born in the Chicago suburbs on Dec. 29, 1937, to a family of garbage haulers. He attended Calvin College in Grand Rapids Authentic Mike Hughes Jersey , Michigan, but dropped out and began his own garbage hauling business in Pompano Beach, Florida, in 1962. He would drive a garbage truck from 2 a.m. to noon each day, then shower and go out and solicit new customers in the afternoon.

One customer successfully sued Huizenga, saying that in an argument over a delinquent account, Huizenga injured him by grabbing his testicles 鈥?an allegation Huizenga always denied.

"I never did that. The guy was a deputy cop. It was his word against mine, a young kid," he told Fortune magazine in 1996.

He eventually bought out several competitors, expanding throughout South Florida. In 1968, he merged with the Chicago sanitation company his uncles owned, creating Waste Management Inc., which eventually became the world's largest trash company. That became his method of operation 鈥?becoming the first national player in industries that had been dominated by small and local operations. He resigned from the company in 1984, taking $100 million in stock.

But retirement bored him and he soon began buying dozens of small businesses like hotels and pest control companies. In 1987, a business partner persuaded him to check out Blockbuster, a small chain of video stores. At the time, video stores were mostly locally owned mom-and-pop operations. Huizenga didn't even own a VCR.

"I had an image of them being dark and dingy and dirty types of adult bookstores," h.