The Cincinnati Bengals have had to deal with a ton of adversity dating back to last summer.
There have been key injuries, like losing a huge chunk of the defense line. Joe Burrow was slowly working back from his own injury, among other notables.
And then there were those pesky contract standoffs.
Tee Higgins had the standoff over the franchise tag before reporting for camp. Trey Hendrickson, at one point, requested a trade before going full in camp. And Ja’Marr Chase’s big dispute bled into the season itself.
Yet, coming out of his team’s first win of the season, Bengals head coach Zac Taylor has nothing but praise for how his trio of stars handled things.
“I can’t point to that as the reason we’ve lost any of those games. And I couldn’t be happier with how those three guys are handling themselves right now,” Taylor told Albert Breer of Sports Illustrated. “Honestly, you wouldn’t even know that they had those situations going on because they’ve just kind of gone all in with the team. …
“We’ve got guys that deserve to be paid and want to be paid. But we also got guys that want to win a Super Bowl. I can’t speak for them, but I do know that they know, Hey, if I show up and I work, we got a chance to do some special things. That’s kind of the attitude I see from those guys.”
Normally, this might just fall under the “coach speak” umbrella, sure. But the attendance and performance for all three guys when the games matter has been stellar, for the most part.
So while outside noise like this tends to hit teams when it matters most, the Bengals have endured the hit. Were the slow starts isolated to this season, perhaps we could suggest the contract standoffs were big factors — but slow starts have been one of the most consistent details of the Zac Taylor era and injuries played a big role this year, too.
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