Injuries happen in the NFL. There isn\u2019t a team in the league that will be able to completely avoid them, and the teams that make deep playoff runs are often the ones who luckily avoided catastrophic injury.<\/p>\n
The injury bug has bitten the Cincinnati Bengals\u2014wide receiver Andrei Iosivas was placed on IR and is expected to miss four to six weeks with a torn ligament in his thumb. It isn\u2019t a huge loss, but Iosivas has Joe Burrow\u2019s trust and has earned his spot at WR3 on the team.<\/p>\n
Now it\u2019s time for the \u201cnext man up,\u201d and that next man is likely going to be Colbie Young or Dohnte Meyers or a combination of the two. Both are in the league, which means they\u2019re already among the best in the world at what they do, but neither has a ton of game experience.<\/p>\n
Young says he\u2019s ready to use this opportunity to prove himself, and he\u2019s been working hard to make sure he doesn\u2019t let it slip through his fingers.<\/p>\n
\u201cI feel like he (Burrow) trusts me, and I trust him,\u201d Young said this week. \u201cI feel like we\u2019re gonna be on a roll. I\u2019ve been preparing my whole career so far, so I\u2019m ready to go to work.\u201d<\/p>\n
The two top targets on the team are Ja\u2019Marr Chase and Tee Higgins, but they\u2019re often both doubled, which leaves large parts of the field open for others to find open room, or beat their man. Iosivas wasn\u2019t always the next target as Burrow has spread the ball around, but Young still knows he has some big shoes to fill.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s so unfortunate that he goes down like that with the role he had in this offense,\u201d Young said. \u201cI just want to be where I need to be, show up every day, eliminate MAs (missed assignments), and I know the offense like (Yoshi) does.\u201d<\/p>\n
Defenses have to pick their poison when they face the Bengals, and because they\u2019re often so dead set on keeping all eyes on Chase and Higgins, others find themselves in space with room to work. It will be interesting to see how the WR3 spot evolves over the next few weeks as Iosivas gets healthy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Injuries happen in the NFL. There isn\u2019t a team in the league that will be able to completely…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1011048,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2053],"tags":[228,227,256,4226,21233,2296,7,6],"class_list":["post-1011047","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cincinnati-bengals","tag-bengals","tag-cincinnati","tag-cincinnati-bengals","tag-cincinnati-bengals-analysis","tag-cincinnati-bengals-injuries","tag-cincinnatibengals","tag-football","tag-nfl"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/117336043918718063","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1011047","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1011047"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1011047\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1011048"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1011047"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1011047"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1011047"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}