Failures persist in all three phases.
Sorry, Zac, but I’m just not buying it.
“We’re a good football team,” Cincinnati Bengals coach Zac Taylor said after another disappointing, heart-breaking, last-minute loss, this time to the Los Angeles Chargers Sunday night.
This is not a good football team. Maybe it still can be, but as of right now, it is not.
A good football team excels in all three areas — offense, defense and special teams. The Bengals excel in none of those areas, the most obvious of which is the defense.
The latest meltdown came against the Chargers. After Cincinnati had clawed back into the game from 21 points down and tied the score at 27-27, the defense allowed three straight explosive plays of 20, 27 and 29 yards. Game over.
The Bengals have lost twice to the Baltimore Ravens. Both times it was big plays that did them in. In the first game, Derrick Henry’s 51-yard run led to the winning field goal.
In the second game, a Cam Taylor-Britt interception was overturned by replay, and the Ravens marched right down the field for a touchdown that extended their lead to 35-28. The big plays in that drive were a 19-yard and a 16-yard completion to Zay Flowers.
Cincinnati did manage to score the potential game-tying touchdown minutes later, but it missed on the two-point conversion that would have won the game.
Defense has been the weakest part of the trifecta all season. The Bengals sit at No. 24 in overall team defense, are 30th in points surrendered, 24th against the run, 26th against the pass, and 27th in total yards given up. Definitely not good.
Special teams have let Cincinnati down as well. The normally dependable Evan McPherson missed two field goals against the Chargers, field goals that could have made the difference in the game. The Bengals drove to the Los Angeles 43-yard-line with three seconds left, which would have put McPherson in position for a 60-yard field goal attempt to win the game. But, his earlier two misses made that possibility moot.
McPherson has made 9-of-9 field goals from inside 40 yards, but he is just 3-for-5 between 40 and 49 yards. Worse yet, he has hit on only 3-of-7 attempts outside of 50 yards. Money Mac is no longer so money – more like “Missing Mac.”
Lineups.com has Cincinnati’s special teams ranked at No. 25, largely due to McPherson’s struggles. And, the Bengals would be ranked even lower if not for the 100-yard kickoff return by Charlie Jones earlier in the season.
And, as good as the Bengals’ offense has looked at times, there have been plenty of flaws in that unit as well. Sunday night’s loss is a good example. Cincinnati scored the tying touchdown with 12:21 left in the fourth quarter, then went missed field goal, missed field goal, and four-and-out before the Chargers took the lead for good.
The Bengals drove into Los Angeles territory the first three times they had the ball and got all the way down to the Chargers’ 3-yard-line on their second possession. Yet all they had to show for it was a pair of field goals.
Cincinnati scored only 10 points in a season-opening loss to the New England Patriots and managed just 17 points against the Giants (a win) and the Eagles (a loss).
In the first meeting with the Ravens, the Bengals owned a 10-point lead with 8:54 left in the fourth quarter but came up empty the rest of the way.
Quarterback Joe Burrow summed it up this way:
“Just got to make the plays,” he said. “Just got to make the plays. We have it down stretch and we’re not a good enough team to – our margin of error is slim, so we got to make those plays. I got to make those plays. We all got to make those plays.”
So no, Zac, this is not a good football team. As my former mother-in-law used to say, “you can cover the sun with one hand, but it’s still there.”
