CINCINNATI — The Bengals are on the verge of losing any semblance of relevance in the 2025 season.
With the Baltimore Ravens rapidly getting healthier and playing the lowly Miami Dolphins Thursday night, the Ravens could be finally be poised to make the run up from 1-5 to challengers in the AFC North.
The Steelers are still 4-3 and, while – like the Bengals – they have a series of problems with defensive execution and structure – they have Aaron Rodgers, DK Metcalf and a running game to lean on.
The Bengals? They don’t know who their quarterback is this week. They postponed their weekly news conference with the quarterback because they don’t know if it’s going to be Joe Flacco or Jake Browning. Their defense is running on five weeks of poor tackling, missed assignments and bad communication.
The Bengals can root for Indianapolis to beat Pittsburgh this week and for Baltimore to struggle with the likes of the Dolphins and Vikings on the road. And then they can hope to beat the Caleb Williams-led Bears Sunday at Paycor. But all of that is hope, not practicality.
This team was supposed to be flying on the backs of Joe Burrow, Ja’Marr Chase and Tee Higgins with a young, fast defense that would be flying to the football under a defensive coordinator that made a name for himself at Notre Dame by coaching up freshman and sophomores, throwing them into the fire and coaching them up to be productive players on the field.
None of the above has unfolded. Burrow is still recovering (though very quickly by all reports) from left big toe surgery that will put in line for a mid-December return if the Bengals are even in the playoff conversation at that point. The defense has failed miserably by pretty much every metric that NFL defenses are measured. They are dead last (32nd) in the NFL in total defense (407.9 yards/game), 32nd in rushing defense at 151.9 yards per game and 30th in passing at 256 yards per game.
They are the worst tackling team in the NFL at 84 missed tackles in eight games, 19 more than second-worst Washington. Do the math and that’s over 10 missed tackles per contest. They have 11 sacks, tied with the Jets for third-worst in the NFL. Trey Hendrickson is a major question mark to play this week with a re-injured right hip.
So where do the Bengals stand?
The offensive line is shaping into form nicely thanks to what was a weakness early. Their interior line seems to be providing the kind of push needed to establish a run game without Joe Burrow. It’s coming from more snaps a game under center, first with Browning and now with Flacco calling the signals. Ted Karras has rebounded from a rough start and has started moving defensive tackles in front of him, one of the keys to opening holes in the run game. His leadership has also impacted the likes of starting rookie guards in Dylan Fairchild and Jalen Rivers.
“He does a great job. He’s certainly a leader on the field,” Zac Taylor said Wednesday. “Certainly a leader in the o-line room. Probably my favorite time of day with Ted is the walk throughs. Just the commitment to excellence he’s got in the walk through and the energy he plays with and the detail. Trying to get it right and asking the right questions to get us going. So, there’s a things people probably wouldn’t even see. They see the emotion on the field and the effort he plays with. But he’s consistent with that throughout the day, throughout the preparation. And it’s great when you have a captain like that’s like that, who continues to lead the others the right way. He’s pulling people up. He’s trying to make people better. He’s demanding of other people. He’s very demanding of the rookies next to him, and I think that’s a big part of it.”
Offensive coordinator Dan Pitcher agrees.
“Ted’s played really, really well,” Pitcher said. “I mean, the whole the units played really well over the last two weeks. And I think Ted’s the leader of the unit, and Ted, his actual play has been at a high level, and then his leadership and his ability to get everything communicated and keep those guys going on a on a daily basis, you know everybody sees the mic’d up on Sunday and all that’s authentic. I just lived that for 30 minutes in a walkthrough on a Wednesday. Maybe not the exact same level of intensity, but that ain’t a show like, that’s the urgency that you feel in him every day, that’s the guys around him have to match it, or else it’s just not gonna work. And so guys like that are invaluable.”
The run game has gone from 48 yards a game to over 110 yards per contest against the Steelers and Jets. It’s still 31st ranked in the NFL but you can sense the improvement by the eye-test.
“I mean, I think we have better…opportunity with drives,” Taylor added. “I think you guys have heard me talk a million times, getting that first first-down allows us to get into a flow and we’ve done a much better job of that these last couple weeks. We got a chance to give the run game some opportunity there. And you know, sometimes people are so hellbent on taking away our receivers, it opens up a great opportunity and our guys have done a good job maximizing that and we’ll have to keep that up.
“They’ve worked really hard at it. Even when we weren’t, really, statistically, on the tape having a great deal of success, we still believed we were right there. It was just, ‘we’ve got to fine tune some things to continue to improve.’ You know, we’ve had two young guards that have been playing in there and they’re only gonna get better with every rep they take. So again, we’ve been mixing in people in that room and whoever it is, whether it’s the two rookies, whether it’s been Dalton or Lucas, I’ve got confidence in that room to continue to rise up. And again, they have a lot of confidence right now. So, sometimes you just into a rhythm and things start to click and you find a little bit of your identity in the run game. You start to maximize that, and then you have some success, and then the guys see, ‘we’ve got a great, cohesive unit here. We’re finding success in this.’ That confidence gives you momentum and then you continue to build off that momentum. I think that’s just what these last couple weeks have been for us.”
Until the Bengals fix the multitude of holes on a Swiss cheese defense, all the players-only meetings aren’t going to change a thing. The Bengals are too frequently out of position and leaving wide open gaps in pass defense hand-offs, where one defensive back is in man and another is playing zone. That happened several times in the implosion against the Jets. The Bengals rookie linebackers are guessing wrong in their gap fits in run defense and there’s no downhill safety (Jordan Battle) to be found too often. The safeties don’t possess make-up speed and have not done a good job bringing the ball carrier to the ground. Shemar Stewart was making progress before he sprained his ankle and missed four games. He looks like he jumped back on a moving train at 100 miles per hour and is just trying to get his feet under him in the last two games. Al Golden all but admitted this week he’s got to start gambling to put pressure on opposing quarterbacks but the standard pressures just are not getting home. Golden may be in desperation mode but it’d be nice if his players started playing with a sense of desperation and urgency, which is precisely what Monday’s players-only meeting was about. It was also about holding each other accountable and making sure that everyone is on the same page with defensive calls. It’s a football cliche on defense: It’s OK if 11 players are on the wrong page but it better be the same wrong page.
“It was a collective group, honestly, man, the sense of like, we need to get this together,” Cam Taylor-Britt said of Monday’s meeting. “We’re the only ones that can do it, regardless what the coaches call is literally on us. We’re the ones on the field. Logan (Wilson), Trey (Hendrickson), Geno (Stone), DJ (Turner), like it’s really a defensive effort, man. I feel like we all notice at the end of day, nobody can do anything about it but us… So, at the end of the day, like I said, we know what the need to do and come together and play together, play complementary football.”
“I always want the game to be on us,” defensive end Myles Murphy said. “I want the game to be on our backs. That’s kind of how I’ve always been since high school. I want the game to be dependent on what we do on our side of the ball. So, yeah, I think it was very encouraging seeing what all of us did these past few weeks, honestly.”
The coaching and roster building of the 2025 Bengals has failed badly at this point. Losing a two-touchdown lead at home in the final 15 minutes to a winless team that was missing its top two receivers and it’s All-Pro corner is a good way to get a coach fired, or for a coach to get fired, depending on the perspective. Last Sunday at Paycor was the low point of the Zac Taylor era in Cincinnati. That’s not disputable. Going 2-14 with a bad roster or 4-11-1 with a rookie quarterback who gets knocked out midway through because of an offensive line that couldn’t adequately protect him is one thing. Melting down against a team that was asking to be blown out of your building with your season on the verge of turning around is quite another. It also perfectly reflected what the Bengals are under Taylor – an offense that can score in bunches with a strong-willed, strong-armed quarterback but can’t stop anyone because the defense is pushed easily off the line and the defense is constantly out of position. The other part of this, of course, is the front office and ownership. They are supposed to work in concert with Taylor to build the right roster to complement the offense and they’ve failed miserably. The drafts are a well-documented and abject disaster. This is not to be personal. It’s to point out the obvious: You can’t miss consistently on first and second-round picks and expect there to be no serious repercussions down the road. The Bengals signed their stars and that’s full marks for that. But you better be able to draft players that can come in and immediately produce or, at the very least, produce in the first two years of a rookie contract. One look at the Bengals defensive line, linebackers and secondary tells you they haven’t. Add to that, they have let two critical players (Jessie Bates, D.J. Reader) go in free agency without replacing them, and you see clearly the problem. How will the Bengals handle the trade deadline of next Tuesday? We’ve already seen teams like Baltimore and Pittsburgh make moves. Should they lose to the Bears, the bold (and smart move) would be to trade Trey Hendrickson for pieces to rebuild the defense. But, given their draft history without a general manager, that is no sure thing.
