Tuesday Trenches: Bengals, your Week 1 loss……. Woof!

After a couple nights to digest the Bengals’ Week 1 loss, how do you feel?

It’s just one game.

That’s very true. Nothing is set in stone. There have been a bunch of teams that have gone on to win the Super Bowl after losing the first game of the season. The Cincinnati Bengals are known to be slow starters, and they couldn’t have started much slower than they did on Sunday.

But, all is not lost.

It’s Week 2, and there’s more than enough football left for the Bengals to right the ship. Now that I’ve slept on it, and watched it a second time, there was some good and, obviously, a lot of bad.

I have written paragraphs then decided they were too reactionary and erased them. I’ve sat at this desk and stared at this screen for a long time, not sure what to type.

Here’s the best I got:

On Sunday, I saw a bad team (the Patriots), that was prepared for the regular season, beat a much better team (the Bengals), that was woefully unprepared for the season opener. Just like last year. Just like the year before that. Just like the year before that. Just like……..

You get the idea.

Zac Taylor’s Bengals have a bad habit of not getting all four wheels on the road until the first quarter of the season is over. Sometimes it works, like when the Bengals went to the Super Bowl and the AFC Championship in back-to-back years. Sometimes it doesn’t work, like all the other seasons.

I completely understand Taylor’s concept of the preseason. If you have a prize race horse, you don’t let them run in races that don’t matter. If they get hurt, they got hurt for nothing.

The last thing the Bengals want to do is let Burrow, Ja’Marr Chase, Tee Higgins, Trey Hendrickson, or anyone else on the roster get hurt before the season even begins.

But, it happened with Burrow in 2023 anyway. It happened to Amarius Mims before the season. It happened to Higgins before the season. It happened to McKinnley Jackson and Kris Jenkins (though they did play in the preseason, being rookies). This is football, and while they’ve tried to make the game safer, it’s not safe.

If football was safe, I could play, and, as it stands today, I’m fairly sure I wouldn’t survive a full game in the NFL. Injuries are a part of the game. How a team can respond to them directly correlates to how good they can be. I get Burrow has shown he’s injury prone, but one series in the preseason isn’t enough to win the first regular-season game.

This isn’t the NBA or MLB. There aren’t 80-plus games to play. There are only 17, and if you’re a legit Super Bowl contender, and you want to play the conference championship at home, every game is important. Especially a season-opening game in front of a home crowd, wearing a new uniform combination and setting the tone for a Week 2 matchup against the Chiefs in a game that could decide home-field advantage, you want to put on a show.

I’m tired of the home-stretch of the season being full of must-win games. Wouldn’t it be nice to head into the Week 12 bye with an 8-3 or 9-2 record? It would take a late-season nosedive of epic proportions to miss the postseason.

The Bengals have driven down this road before, and they seem surprised when they end up with an 0-2 record when they get to Week 3.

When are they going to take a different road?

Here are some other things I noticed:

• Upon first viewing, I thought the offensive line struggled as Burrow seemed rattled by pressure. Upon second viewing, I don’t think that’s the case. The line was fine. Not great, but certainly not terrible. Burrow seemed to struggle with pressure on Sunday. I don’t think it’s a sign of things to come: I just think he’s still getting up to game speed.
• Having said that about the offensive line, Trent Brown struggled badly as a pass protector. There were several times he looked like he was wearing roller skates. He did play every snap, though. Hopefully he picks it up or Amarius Mims is healthy soon.
• Chase and Burrow weren’t on the same page. They’ll get there, but I’m not confident they’ll be there by this coming Sunday.
• The Bengals obviously have very little confidence in Jermaine Burton’s ability to be in the right place at the right time. He got very little time on the field. I imagine, if Higgins is healthy on Sunday, Burton could be a scratch, unless his role on special teams expands.
• I’m not going to hound on Charlie Jones too much about the fumble. It was poorly timed, but it was a good tackle and just an unfortunate play. I will say this, though, I was thoroughly unimpressed by his ability to return punts based on Sunday’s performance.
• Tanner Hudson’s fumble was absolutely terrible. I have no idea what he was trying to do with the ball, but whatever it was, it took seven points off the board for the Bengals and gave three to the Pats (they drove down the field, but settled for a field goal). That’s a 10-point swing. That’s the game. Protect the ball, dude. There are too many talented tight ends on this team itching to make a play for Hudson to pull a stunt like that.
• The Patriots just imposed their will on the Bengals on Sunday. At the end of the game, when the Patriots just wanted to run the ball and kill clock, the Bengals were powerless to stop them. If you remember correctly, stopping the run was a major issue for the 2023 Bengals. So far, the same is true for the 2024 team.
• Trey Hendrickson did his job on Sunday. He was consistently beating his man into the backfield. There wasn’t much of a pass rush from anyone else, though. It’d be nice to see a little help from anyone else. Hendrickson had a bunch of almost-sacks. Of course, almost-sacks don’t matter.
• Defensively, tackling was about as bad as tackling can get. There were numerous times that the Patriots ball carriers gained an extra yard here or there because of poor tackling. A handful of yards here or there turn into extra first downs, and those translate to points on the board.
• The Patriots did what they could to lose. A better team doesn’t beat the Bengals by one score. If the Bengals look like that against the Chiefs, they’ll get beat 30-something to nothing.
• I think the future of Burrow and tight end Mike Gesicki is bright.
• The Bengals added Ryan Rehkow to the active roster largely because Brad Robbins is on IR. Neither punter looked great during the preseason. On Sunday, a different Rehkow showed up. He broke the franchise record for longest punt, and just consistently flipped the field when the offense couldn’t get anything going. Wow.

—

There’s a lot more, but I think it’s time to put this to bed. The Bengals were bad on Sunday. We know it. They know it. The question is this: do you trust them to right the ship?

I do.

I don’t know what team will show up on Sunday afternoon against the Chiefs. I’m assuming it’ll be a better version of what we saw this past weekend. It has to be, because it can’t get much worse. Will it be good enough to defeat the two-time defending Super Bowl Champion Chiefs?

We’ll see.

Relative Song Lyrics:

When you’re low down and dirty from walkin’ the street
With your old hurdy-gurdy no one to meet.
Say love ain’t the same on the south side of town
You could look but ain’t gonna find it around.