Bengals Beat: Darrin Simmons Expects Evan McPherson ‘To Feel’ Responsibility Of His Contract, ‘Evaluate Everything’ To Eliminate Slow Starts

INDIANAPOLIS — When you’ve been with one team for 22 seasons, you get a feel for what works and what doesn’t. Darrin Simmons began his Bengals coaching career in 2003 with Marvin Lewis. He has been around for all the good and bad in between.

He’s seen Super Bowl runs and a 2-14 season. He’s been through COVID. He’s seen a trio of great quarterbacks and he’s coached a pair of Pro Bowl kickers and punters.

There’s a reason he’s made his way up the ranks in the organization to assistant head coach status behind Zac Taylor. That’s why when he makes observations about the way the Bengals operate on the field, it should be taken with more than just casual reflection.

Simmons, who turns 52 on April 9, made several of those observations this week in Indianapolis, where he runs several drills during the NFL Combine. He knows what he’s looking at and he knows how to get the most out of the athletes that are trying to prove their worthiness in the league.

First, on the state of Bengals star kicker Evan McPherson, who suffered a season-ending groin injury in the loss to the Steelers at Paycor, Simmons said McPherson will have to start living up to his three-year, $16.5 million contract next season. This after McPherson went 16-of-22 on field goal attempts and missed a pair of makable fourth-quarter field goals against the Chargers in November that figured in the Bengals losing the game and missing the playoffs.

“The one thing, he’s got to get himself healthy again,” Simmons said. “Obviously, it was a shot to us to lose him with the injury. But it’s going to be up to Evan (at) a critical time in his career. It’s great that he signed this new contract for him, but I think with that comes a lot of responsibility, and I need him to feel that. I need him to know that there’s a lot of guys are counting on him, and he’s got to count on other guys too. He’s got to count on the snap, on the hold, to be where he needs to be. But I have a high degree of confidence in that he get back to where he was and we’ll be good to go.”

McPherson missed a career-high six field goals after missing five in each of his previous three seasons. The biggest issue is making sure McPherson is healthy and is conditioning himself in the offseason to be ready for the rigors of the season.

“I think he’s fine now, I think he’s healthy and feels well,” Simmons told me. “But it’s something I’ve got to try to research a little bit too, with the difference in the way we kick off. Now, the kicks are a little different. On kickoff, we kick off probably a little more, although they may not be full swings in practice. But did that have some role to play? Was the injury an overused thing? I just think from his standpoint, this is a couple times, this has happened to him. Happened his rookie year. We end up missing a game at the end of the year his rookie year, but he’s got to find a way to get himself strong and healthy and prove that he can make it through the whole season.”

But injuries aside, Simmons acknowledged that the biggest issue is the entire kicking operation, starting with long snapper Cal Adomitis and holder Ryan Rehkow.

“There are three moving parts, and if Part A is not right, and Part B is not right, then his part, part C, makes it a struggle,” Simmons said. “And if it happens continuously over time, then yeah, I think it does make you start to question things a little bit. I think that’s the struggle that all these guys have to deal with, is they all got to rely on each other, and he’s the guy at the end of the line. But when?

“When A and B are correct and C’s got to be correct too, and that’s his responsibility. So again, I think the more just the more time on task these guys have together. I think that’ll come together, and they’ll come together fine. They just need to get it rectified.”

As for the kicks that were missed at home in the Baltimore loss and on the road at Los Angeles, Simmons never got the sense that McPherson, a new father last offseason, had a loss of confidence.

“I don’t think that ever really got affected with him,” Simmons said. “He’s very good at compartmentalizing his emotions and feelings a bit, and that’s what makes him unique, and I think he dealt with a lot the whole season, probably more than what he’s dealt with at any point. And I think in the end, I think we’ve got to make it better. We got to make his job a little easier.”

Simmons didn’t hold back on the need to address the 1-11 starts in the opening two weeks of the season the last six years, or the 7-8 mark in September since 2021, including 0-3 mark to start this past season.

“I think we’ve proven that we’ve got to get off to better starts I think that’s a fact, and it’s been a continuing trend for us for the last couple years,” Simmons said. “I think we have to evaluate everything the way we practice, the way we play preseason games. I think the goal that we have to always keep in mind is we’re trying to get our team to game on as fresh as they can possibly be and as healthy as we can possibly. And I think for the most part, we’ve done that.

“The thing we could look at is, do we need to have more contact? Do we need to play more in preseason games? Do we need to change up the way or the times or how we practice? Is to change things up? I mean, that’s all something we were still talking about. We don’t have the answer for it. If we had the answer for it, we’d changed it a while back. But it’s certainly something that we know is a big issue for us that we got to get fixed.”

This year the Bengals were playing their most consistent football at the end after recovering from the 0-3 and 1-4 start.

“We’ve done it before but we just ran out of time this year,” Simmons said. “We just got off to such a slow start. We’ve been able to come back from those slower starts in years past and still make it at the end of the year. They were just too little, too late. And we certainly, for us to get where we need to get, we’ve got to get off to much faster starts when we’ve done the past. I think that’s everybody recognizes that we’ve got to try to find a way.

“There’s a multitude of things, I think, that we could look at to potentially help that, have you, have you done that yet? Or well, we really wouldn’t. Now, we haven’t made any final decisions yet. I mean, we’re still a month some change from the end of the season. We still got a lot of time to talk that through and forget a plan on how we do that going forward, or help that going forward.”

As for the overall assessment of his special teams in 2024, Simmons offering the following:

“Start with kickoff and kickoff return, that was the biggest change for us. I thought we did a good job there. I was real pleased with the way our guys adapted to the rule change. It was extensive, and it took a lot of adjustment for us, where we started back in April to where we finished up in January. I thought they did a really good job of adapting to new rules, taking advantage of when balls were kicked to us and when they weren’t on kickoff return.”

“I thought that we made some explosive plays and kickoff return. Obviously, the the play that Charlie (Jones) made in the Cleveland (road) game was a big one. Helped us really get going there. We’ve had some struggles in Cleveland before, so that was a good way to get that game started. But overall, I felt that on kickoff return, our guys did what we needed to do. I thought we played well on kickoff too. We didn’t cover a lot of kickoffs, you know, meaning put the ball in play to actually cover, but I thought when we did, we were very effective with it.”

“I think we finished up in the top of league, top one or two in league. We had some guys that, you know, really showed what they can do and made the role important that way. I thought was on our punt game, I thought we did relatively well, you know, obviously, it starts with having a rookie punter and Ryan Rehkow and I thought he did a really good job as a rookie. He broke the club record, I think, for both gross and net. He made the all rookie team as a college free agent, so that’s a big deal. And I thought he had a pretty solid year for the most part.”

“I thought we covered (punts) really well. I thought Tycen Anderson really stuck out in coverage as a gunner. I think he may have led the league in tackles from the gunner position. So I thought that, you know, we whenever we had to flip field position, we did on the punt in the punt game, I think because of the rules on kickoff and kickoff return, though, we actually punted less because of the field position difference. We actually punted less in the way that we go for them, fourth down a lot on offense, we actually punted less than we ever have. But when we did, I thought it was pretty effective.”

“I’m disappointed in our punt return game. We never really got going from the get go. And then we lost Charlie, and went through a variety of guys, from Trenton Irwin to Isiah Williams. We went through a lot of guys. We just were never able to get our footing and get flowing in the pump and turn game. So I’m disappointed in our pump and turn game. I’m like, I’m also disappointed in our field goal operation. I was pleased with the protections.”

“We’ve got to be better in terms of making field goals, whether it’s regular course of a game or in critical spots. We have to have better operation from the snap and the hold and the kick. That’s got to come together better. I think it will in the future, once these guys get more time on task together. Evan’s been through a lot of holders in his time. He’s went from Kevin (Huber) to Drue (Chrisman) to Brad (Robbins) to Ryan, now, and we need to get that settled and that hopefully we have. So, that part’s got to improve, certainly for us. So overall, I think it was a solid year. Like I said, I wish our field goals were a little better, or field goal percentage was better. And I wish we could have really got the punt return game going.”