CINCINNATI (WXIX) – While Joe Burrow is all about winning Super Bowls, nearly 80% of the Cincinnati Bengals’ roster hasn’t appeared in a playoff game yet with the team. Burrow is an elite winner playing on what he calls a bad football team. Burrow, who definitively knows he’s one of the best players in the sport, is in a much different headspace than the guys on defense who are trying to prove they belong in the NFL, working on fundamentals like tackling and trying to iron out their understanding of the scheme.
The story of the last two years of Bengals’ football is that Burrow is learning that even a superhero needs help, and he’s seeing that he needs more help around him than he has right now.
“What we’ve been doing hasn’t worked the last couple of years,” Burrow said. “We have to think outside the box and get creative about where we go from here.”
Burrow won’t throw his teammates under the bus, but the only answer to the Bengals’ problems is finding more good players. If the Bengals fix the defense, I’m not particularly concerned about what team he’ll be playing for in 2030. If they never fix the defense, then we’ll have many more press conferences where Burrow talks about “thinking about a lot of things.”
Burrow speaks for the team, and the Bengals’ locker room and coaching staff (assuming the group returns in 2026) sound like they agree with the importance of making changes heading into 2026.
“This isn’t the season we wanted,” Chase Brown said. “You look at seasons before where we were 9-8. You leave those seasons feeling alright, we could have made it to the playoffs and we didn’t make it. I don’t want to say we were complacent. This year is a wake up call.”
***The year that the Bengals made it to the Super Bowl, Demetrius Knight was a quarterback at Georgia Tech. Barrett Carter was a freshman at Clemson. Shemar Stewart was in high school.Along with Burrow, Ja’Marr Chase and Tee Higgins, guys like Tyler Boyd, CJ Uzomah, DJ Reader, Sam Hubbard, Vonn Bell and Jessie Bates established a championship-caliber culture.
How do you carry over that culture to a roster filled with players who have never even met those former team captains?
“We’ve got a rhythm that we think serves us well,” Zac Taylor said. “We’re never afraid to modify anything over the course of the week. You do lean on the coaching staff who has been in those games you mentioned.”The Bengals’ position coaches at running back, receiver, tight end and safety were with the team in 2021, and the cornerbacks coach joined the team in 2022. Coordinators Dan Pitcher and Al Golden were on the staff for deep playoff runs. The Bengals’ defensive line coach and linebackers coach have coached on other teams that have made deep playoff runs.
Taylor also stressed the importance of a draft trend that carries over from 2019 to the present. The Bengals draft a lot of players who competed for championships in college.
“We feel like we have accumulated a lot of guys that have won,” Taylor said. “That hasn’t gotten us where we need to be this year but there is certainly a winning attitude in the locker room and guys understand what the standard looks like and doing a good job holding each other to that.”
Some leaders have stepped up over the course of the year, including DJ Turner and Jordan Battle. But this is still a team that had Taylor pleading for leadership to step up in the middle of the season. This season still got away from the Bengals because the defense had no response to adversity for the majority of the year.
Chase Brown is one of the most established players on the roster, but the third-year running back hasn’t played in the playoffs. All he has known since he got drafted in 2023 has been the Bengals’ shift from contention to a rebuild.
“We lost a lot of veterans from that championship roster,” Brown said. “Vonn Bell. Jessie Bates. DJ Reader. Really good locker room guys, as far as I understand. Not guys I necessarily played with, but guys that really held people accountable and didn’t put up with (nonsense) or anything that went against the main goal.”
Going forward, this defense still needs its own versions of Reader, Hubbard, Bates and Bell to emerge.
“It’s how they carried themselves,” Dax Hill said about those former teammates. “They respect the game. You saw the work they put into it. I want to approach the game the same way. The guys that have been here, we know the way and they know the standard. You try to permeate that throughout the entire building. You reinforce that with the guys who have been here.”
***
Golden had the numbers memorized. Looking for positives to help build up the confidence of the defense, the defensive coordinator cited the fact that the red zone defense has been much improved since the bye with eight stops in 14 trips. The defense has been good on third-and-7-to-10, getting the stop on 91% of those plays since the bye week.
During the bye, Golden decided to open up the playbook and evolve the Bengals’ philosophy on third down.
Golden and Taylor have been emphasizing the message that the Bengals’ young defense is showing tangible improvements.
Taylor said, “Nobody wants to hear it, but I do think there are things on defense that have really improved particularly since the bye.”
Golden said, “I don’t think there’s any question we have a much better sense of who we are.”
Myles Murphy, DJ Turner, Battle and Joseph Ossai have all improved. Dax Hill is a good piece. As a whole, the fundamentals are better. Missed assignments are less frequent than they were in the first half of the year.
“What turned around was guys being bought in,” Battle said. “The coaches making adjustments and guys doing their jobs. Being in the right gaps. Swarming to the ball. Not allowing everything to be a solo tackle — we’ve been better at tackling. We’re doing better communicating as well and getting on the same page.”
Over the next three weeks, the Bengals’ defense will face Quinn Ewers, Jacoby Brissett and Shedeur Sanders. Since the defense won’t be facing any dangerous offenses down the stretch, the book is essentially closed on the evaluation of this year’s defense.
The Bengals can’t make the same mistake that they made at this point last year when the defense finished strong against Cooper Rush, Will Levis, Dorian Thompson-Robinson and Russell Wilson (as well as an inexperienced Bo Nix).
“It’s frustrating,” Battle said. “Last year, you saw the same thing. We were getting better toward the end of the season. This year, we came back and thought we’d start off very great. Obviously, things got out of hand. It has to start from the start. Be physical. Be a team that teams say will be a fight. Scratch and claw at the ball. Force turnovers. Hit hard. Play with a physicality and a determination.”
Golden’s scheme changes since the bye show some concrete signs about the vision for this defense. The unit is showing more tendencies from the Mike MacDonald/Seahawks/Ravens tree. Instead of having a true free safety and a true strong safety, the roles of the safeties are more interchangeable. Golden is calling a lot of simulated pressures where linebackers and defensive backs blitz while defensive linemen drop back in coverage. He’s also calling more pressure early in downs.
When the Bengals get the rare chance to play with the lead, they shift into more conservative two-high shells and try rushing with four. The Bengals allowed the Jets and Bills to come back because the defense, missing Trey Hendrickson, lacked a closer. Pass rush help looks like this team’s biggest need heading into 2026, and the defensive line is going to need to create more havoc in 2026 for this defensive system to work.
“The biggest thing I take away from this year is make the plays that you can make, especially when you’re in the right position,” BJ Hill said. “A lot of times, we were right there in the right position. We just didn’t make the play. That hurt us in a lot of games. Think about the Bills game. We missed two sacks. It’s that little thing. If we did that our record would be way different.”
I went through every crushing play that the defense has allowed this year. More often than not, the defense is in the right call. The players just weren’t good enough to make a play that was right in front of them, or they showed their inexperience by messing up an assignment.
Some examples: The Ravens’ touchdown on an early third down blitz (Myles Murphy doesn’t pick up the running back), Lamar Jackson’s deep touchdown throw before halftime last week (Geno Stone took a bad angle), third-and-15 against the Bills (Geno Stone misses a tackle), Josh Allen’s long TD run (Cedric Johnson misses a tackle), the Patriots’ lone TD versus the Bengals (Knight loses the tight end on a play action), the Steelers’ third-and-long conversions (missed tackles galore), the Jets’ two-point conversions (can’t finish) and the Bears’ last-second touchdown (Josh Newton was in the wrong place).
The players just aren’t good enough across the board. And there aren’t enough playmakers, especially on the defensive line, to generate enough negative plays that would kill enough drives for the Bengals to win enough games this season.
“The vision is there,” Dax Hill said. “It just takes time to achieve that vision. Just having faith in Al that he’s going to put us in good positions and make the adjustments that need to be made. The guys that we have in this room, you can see the potential. Hopefully that just carries over. Just learning from this season, we’ll learn from past mistakes and what we can do better.”
***
For all of the talk about when are the Bengals going to change, at least on the coaching level, there’s a proven track record of being willing to shake things up.
Golden changed his approach as a play caller after the bye week. It feels like Taylor shifts the Bengals’ run scheme around Week 6 every season, and the offense does a lot more play action than it used to do. Taylor moved training camp practices to the morning. He has empowered director of football research Sam Francis over the last seven years to become an important voice in in-game decision making.
One of the biggest changes that Taylor has made during his head coaching career took place around Week 6 this year.
While Taylor didn’t announce it, his actions show that he essentially decided that this was going to be a rebuilding season for the Bengals. Highlighted by benching Logan Wilson for Barrett Carter, just about every decision that he made could be viewed under the lens of giving the young players more of a runway to develop and step into bigger roles. When I look back on the 2025 season, the first thing I’ll think about will be the ways that the rookie linebackers struggled.
“We’re definitely young,” BJ Hill said. “There are definitely challenges. Some guys are learning. We have two young linebackers thrown into the fire early in their careers. It’ll be good for them in the long run. They’ll be here for a long time. You live and you learn. You never get down. You move on and learn from your mistakes to become a better player.”
Assuming that Taylor and Golden return in 2026, they’ve shown with their actions that they’re not stubborn coaches who will just run it back and cross their fingers.
“The blame falls at my feet,” Taylor said. “Nobody else’s truthfully. I got my hands all over this thing. I haven’t done a good enough job. I understand that.”
The roster needs work. That’s also not entirely in Taylor’s control.
What is in his control is reestablishing the winning culture that accelerated the Bengals’ rebuild heading into the 2021 season. That’s Taylor’s biggest responsibility this offseason.
“This is very similar to the end of 2020,” Taylor said. “It felt very bleak, and it was discouraging. All we did was turn around and respond with back-to-back divisional championships, which is rare to do in this division. (We played) for conference championships, played for Super Bowls. I feel extreme confidence that we know how to do that. We know how to get back to that, and that’s exactly what we’re going to set our mind to do.”
Taylor said it. Aside from core pieces like Burrow, Chase and Higgins, the coaches are the connective tissue between the 2021-2022 Bengals and the 2026 Bengals.
The forty-one players on the Bengals who have never appeared in a postseason with Cincinnati need to learn how to win here.
“It’s really culture that separates a losing team from a winning team,” Chase Brown said. “I’m not saying we don’t have the right leadership or anything like that, but there are areas we can improve in that can overall help us go in the right direction.”
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