Why the Bengals' dire situation has glimmer of hope as defense seeks answers

CINCINNATI — In the immediate aftermath of the Bengals’ latest defensive debacle Sunday in a 41-38 overtime loss to the Ravens, head coach Zac Taylor fired off a declarative opinion.

“People can write us off if they really want to,” Taylor said. “I’m not dumb enough to do that.”

A day later, the feeling hadn’t subsided from the coaching staff and players off to the worst start since 2019 and a defense that’s allowed more points per drive through five games than any Bengals team this decade.

They’ve allowed at least 108 yards rushing to every opponent, an average of 151 per game and a defensive rushing success percentage of 47.1, 5 percentage points worse than anyone else in football. And when they sold out to stop it Sunday, Lamar Jackson lit them up for 348 yards and four touchdowns through the air. This just two weeks after Jayden Daniels and the Commanders scored on every possession excluding kneeldowns, with him completing a rookie-record 91 percent of his passes.

Zac Taylor speaks to the media going into Week 6 at NYG.
https://t.co/hMNoEyVK7z

— Cincinnati Bengals (@Bengals) October 7, 2024

Somehow, an offense that scored 33, 34 and 38 points over the last three weeks won only once.

Now the Bengals just lost their most consistent starting cornerback, Dax Hill, for the season with a torn ACL.

Only 9 percent of teams to start 1-4 over the last decade made the playoffs.

No, it’s not all that dumb to write them off. Recalibrating their situation after Sunday’s loss, the prospects are undeniably dire.

That doesn’t mean they are done.

There are too many factors keeping hope alive — none pumping more blood than Joe Burrow and the offense.

Teams playing at their level right now don’t keep losing, no matter how bad the defense. They just don’t. In fact, they’ve never lost at this level in the first place.

At 2.93 points per drive, the Bengals rank second in the NFL behind only the Commanders. That ranks 19th best by any team this century through the first five games of a season.

Of the 80 best offensive starts in that span, not a single other team won only one game. Only the Bengals.

Here are the five teams that won two games or fewer while posting at least 2.5 points per drive this century.

Just five teams won only twice. Notable among the group at 2-3 despite a dominant offense were the 2021 Chiefs, whom the Bengals beat in the AFC Championship Game. Their young defense came together just enough over the second half of the season for Patrick Mahomes to pull them back to the title game. Even they managed two wins to build on.

What the Bengals just pulled off over the first five weeks of the season is essentially unprecedented in modern football.

Breaking a decades-long precedent has to contain fluky finishes. A fourth-and-16 conversion by Mahomes via a penalty in Kansas City. A bad field goal hold by Ryan Rehkow against Baltimore. Two walk-off field goal losses. Four one-possession defeats by 15 total points.

They haven’t closed out games despite countless opportunities. That’s a potentially fatal flaw, maybe even more concerning than the defense. When scoring 30-plus points every week, that really shouldn’t matter. Right now, it has them buried.

Here’s the second prong of the Bengals’ hope. They have played the two best offenses in football — other than their own. Washington ranks first in the league in EPA/play and the Ravens third. Mahomes and the Chiefs were 12th heading into Monday night.

That’s three games already against teams ranked in the league’s top half. How many more do they have remaining on their schedule? Two. Once more against Baltimore and a home game against Philadelphia (13th) later this month.

How many games do they have against teams ranked in the bottom third of the NFL in EPA/play? Nine.

That’s right. Nine.

Their schedule is a string of Daniel Jones, Deshaun Watson (twice), whatever is happening in Vegas, whatever is happening in Pittsburgh twice, Will Levis, Bo Nix and the list goes on.

That’s not saying the Bengals should or will win those games — Jacoby Brissett and the otherwise winless Patriots chuckle at the notion. But the Bengals defense doesn’t need to be great or even good when the offense plays at such an elite level. It just needs to not be a horrendous liability.

Keeping confidence will be a challenge, but veterans like B.J. Hill sound resolute in their belief.

“I know what kind of men we got in this room,” Hill said. “The way we come to work each and every day. Even though we were 1-3 last week, the way we prepared last week told me enough. The way we battled told me enough about (what) we got in this room. … (The offense) has been doing their thing this year. We know we got to carry our own weight.”

The job merely involves a performance like allowing 24 points to Carolina or 26 to Kansas City instead of what’s happened in the last two home games. The Bengals defense, theoretically, can approach mediocrity when not facing the league’s best offenses every week. That buys time for the group to potentially improve with the growth of young players in key positions (DJ Turner, Myles Murphy, Cam Taylor-Britt, etc.). The potential return of defensive tackle Sheldon Rankins this week offers another lift to a pass rush that will have its projected rotation together for the first time this season Sunday versus the Giants.

The ragtag group filling in failed to produce much other than Trey Hendrickson’s pressures while dealing with a debilitating number of injuries.

At some point, they will count on defensive coordinator Lou Anarumo to find answers and scheme up something that resembles the run defense that held Baltimore’s Derrick Henry to 41 yards on 14 carries with a safety before overtime. Anarumo walks the line figuring out how much to change versus how to much to believe in repetition and progress.

“We have to make sure we stay within ourselves to a degree,” Anarumo said. “And there’s always going to be wrinkles in what we do, but you can’t just change because the players have to feel comfortable what they’re doing. So I want to make sure that they understand that, hey, you know, here’s the core of what we do. We’re always going to have a wrinkle here or there for each game plan. I just don’t ever want to just totally abandon it because then they’ll think we’re reaching, and there has to be a base. There has to be a foundation. They know it works. We just got to do better.”

Anarumo balked at the idea that competition level even had a place in the conversation given what he knows can happen every week in the NFL, but there’s no denying life should get easier.

That alone opens the door for Burrow to still lead a run into a notably mediocre middle of the AFC. A collection of flawed teams congregate in the middle of the pack, with only the Chiefs and Texans at 4-1.

After all the tiebreakers, the Bengals are currently the 16th seed. Not exactly a dream scenario. Yet, when looking deeper at the improbability of how they arrived here, the sustainability of what they are producing offensively and the likelihood that the defense improves some strictly due to a lesser degree of difficulty ahead, you can see the potential for a run to come out of this.

What Burrow, Tee Higgins and Ja’Marr Chase are doing means there’s always a chance for a run from a group that has made one to dig out of a hole each of the last three seasons.

Ja’Marr Chase passes Jerry Rice for the 5th-most receiving yards by a player through 50 career games.

Unreal start to his career.

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— NFL (@NFL) October 6, 2024

The obvious problem, even if all those factors come together, is it still might be too late because Cincinnati so badly fumbled the first five weeks.

It’s dire, not done.

“I know what the noise is, we’re 1-4 and so we’re accountable for all that,” Taylor said. “It’s not good enough. We have too much talent on this team to be in the position we’ve found ourselves in right now. But all we can do focusing forward is, how do we beat the New York Giants? How do we have a great week? How do we get back on the winning track? You just look around the AFC, and there’s plenty of opportunity there moving forward, and we just need to take advantage of it. We need to be the best version of ourselves, which we have not been yet.”

(Top photo: Joseph Maiorana / Imagn Images)