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A few days removed from No. 1 overall pick Joe Burrow suffering eight sacks and 12 pressures, bumping his season totals to 14 and 34 in those areas over just three games, Cincinnati Bengals offensive line coach Jim Turner sat down with the media for an eye-brow raising affair.
And to Turner’s credit, he was very up front with the theme that his line just has to play better for Burrow. As he put it, “we couldn’t ask for anymore from our quarterback than we’re getting, for a young player the way he is, as far as handling the offense, it has nothing to do with him,” according to WCPO’s Richard Skinner.
But as far as good commentary from Turner goes, it seems to end there.
The elephant in the room is Bobby Hart, the embattled right tackle with some interesting upside who has never been able to put it all together on the field.
Turner was effusive in his defensive of Hart, going as far as saying the following, per Skinner:
“Hart is the most underappreciated player and the most picked-on player by everybody from the media to whoever wants to talk football. It’s like every pressure we’ve ever had gets blamed on that kid.”
Two problems: Trey Hopkins is the most underappreciated player on the line, an amazing undrafted, surpassing-injuries story to finally steal the starting job (one of our very first articles in 2017 was saying he needed to be a starter). Two: Hart doesn’t get blamed for every pressure, but he sure seems like the guy giving up the most.
And Turner wasn’t done there:
“I think Bobby’s playing the best football I’ve seen him play in his career right now. I think mentally, he’s a great place right now. I think he’s unaffected by anything that’s said about him, and I think he knows, like if you watch his side of the line, it’s solid.
The “if you watch his side of the line” comment, for lack of a better term, feels like gaslighting. Onlookers watch it and see, for the most part, consistent struggles.
And to say Hart is playing the best football of his career is also problematic. Here are his grades at Pro Football Focus annually since entering the league:
- 2015: 60.3
- 2016: 56.4
- 2017: 44.8
- 2018: 57.1
- 2019: 57.6
- 2020: 65.6
Is PFF the only metric that matters? Absolutely not. Are we in the room at Paul Brown Stadium and understanding every little responsibility and intention of each play? Of course not. And if a pro coach can lean into this line of thinking after three games, why do we berate fans for overreacting after three games again? But the above grades are pretty telling. For context, the Bengals finally threw in the towel on someone like Cedric Ogbuehi after grades of 56.6 and 51.9 over his last two seasons in town.
One of the biggest problems here is the tone-deaf nature of the offensive assault from Turner here. He admitted the right guards struggled. He hinted Fred Johnson has to want it. He said the line as a whole has struggled. But instead of just saying the same things about Hart, he lashed out at Hart’s critics, media, fans or otherwise, and defended him. It’s a whole lot of talk about what outsiders are saying while also saying Hart isn’t impacted by the talk at all, right?
So we have to ask: What is it about Bobby Hart?
Hart might be playing the best ball of his career, but he’s still one of the worst tackles in football. Hart showcased these same things after joining the Bengals, then got a three-year extension worth $21 million anyway and the coaching staff has made it very clear he’s untouchable and nobody will challenge for his job. Who did the Bengals think they were competing with for Hart’s services to justify that number at the time? It also brings us to this:
What is it? What has tied the Bengals to a former seventh-round pick who couldn’t make it on a New York Giants team desperate to turn things around who hasn’t shown any meaningful improvement under multiple line coaches?
Turner’s affection with Hart seemed to start in part due to chats with Jimbo Fisher. But he’s clearly taking baby steps in progression in a results-oriented league with little patience for this sort of thing.
It doesn’t help that Turner told Jay Morrison of The Athletic the following this past May:
“I think this group understands that we will bench you. We will sit you down if the guy behind you is better than you. It’s not a big tough guy act or anything. It’s real.”
Right tackle has clearly been an exception. And the excuse about the right guard is merely the latest to cover for Hart too. In September of 2019, Bengals coaches blamed Hart’s nine false starts of the team’s 31 in 2018 on…crowd noise messing with a quiet cadence from quarterback. The solution was to have then-quarterback Andy Dalton whisper his counts in practice and Turner played loud music in the offensive line meeting rooms while linemen put their hands on the desk. This isn’t satire. Hart did get called for fewer penalties last season, but leash on his job security and the fact this was a problem to begin with is puzzling, much like the rest of this.
(and if the worry about right guard is really the case, a guy like Kevin Zeitler should’ve never been allowed to leave or the organization should’ve taken guard positions more seriously after years of practicing against Geno Atkins, but that’s a different, longer conversation).
Zac Taylor, for what it’s worth, also had a presser this week and followed some similar lines of thought:
Some of it is fair. Joe Mixon has again looked hesitant instead of attacking openings, which seems to be an early-season trend now. That’s probably the line’s fault, but we’ll float it out there. And Joe Burrow is a rookie who at times is clearly going to hang onto the ball too long and take sacks and hits that make the line look bad when it’s really on him.
But Turner’s interview was pretty much universally panned for a reason. It’s the latest in a long line of defenses for struggling players from a guy who was a controversial hiring to begin with for many reasons, perhaps chief among them the fact his recent resume just wasn’t that good to begin with. Taylor has seemed to make it clear he’ll go down with the ship rather than make a change, though.
The sad reality is we can’t know what’s really going on inside the building. Is Taylor blind to the issues? Are his brilliant play ideas (and there have been flashes!) being hampered by a line coach he’s needlessly defending, potentially leading to the loss of his job with a team that was more than happy to employ his predecessor for 16 years?
And considering Hart’s play has only taken a very minor uptick in quality and the rest of the line hasn’t improved much, if at all, do the Bengals really want to trust this staff to develop Jonah Williams?
Maybe that’s what is so frustrating for Bengals fans. It was easy to wave off national commentary suggesting Taylor’s staff picks stunk or weren’t qualified. It was borderline offensive when national pundits suggested the Bengals were going to ruin Burrow, espeically compared to a perennsial loser like Miami.
But here we are going over the same old problems since roughly 2015, this time with a controverisal postional coach somewhat oddly, if not personally defended by a second-year head coach.
Were this not a reoccurring theme since Taylor’s arrival and were it not about an organization blatantly lost when it comes to offensive line evaluation and development for so long now, this might be considered an overreaction. But this staff spent the offseason telling fans the line would be better and it looks just as bad as the year prior (it’s now dangling Xavier Su’a-Filo as some sort of savior for the whole unit). If it doesn’t improve, it endangers Burrow further.
And that’s the biggest issue of all: The Bengals backed into a generational quarterback prospect and could outright ruin the whole opportunity — and the homecoming kid storyline — while the coaching staff publicly goes on the offensive for some of the worst linemen in the league.
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