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Sunday’s loss to the Pittsburgh Steelers wasn’t exactly a banner day for the Cincinnati Bengals, with head coach Zac Taylor taking much of the heat.
While much went wrong for the Bengals, including five turnovers by Joe Burrow, two seemingly major gaffes by Taylor dominated the discourse.
On one in overtime near the end of the game, Taylor’s special teams unit went out with a running clock and punted the ball early, which gave the Steelers just enough time to get into field goal range and win it.
Asked by reporters after the game why the unit didn’t let the clock run all the way down, Taylor said the change at long-snapper (Clark Harris suffered an injury early and was ruled out) was the reason:
“New operation. We snapped there with 13 seconds, I understand that, trust me, we’d rather do something different. But just trying to make sure the operation ran smoothly, it turned out that we sacrificed some seconds just to make sure that we were all on the same page there.”
It almost feels like Taylor trying to take the heat for tight end Mitchell Wilcox, who was thrown into long-snapping duties and already played a role in multiple miscues by the unit before this punting issue.
Either way, it’s pretty clear Taylor knows exactly what the miscue cost the team.
It’s a similar story on the would-be Ja’Marr Chase touchdown that the team inexplicably decided not to challenge despite it appearing like the star wideout had a game-winner near the sidelines:
“Part of it was that that’s the hardest place for us to see in the entire field is that spot. I didn’t think there was a chance there was a touchdown there initially. So, we got on the ball to run it in quickly. It’s hard with all the craziness in that moment, all the communication to get that ‘Stop, stop. Let’s evaluate this.’ We just couldn’t get it done fast enough by the time we’d seen a replay and realized ‘Oh shoot, he might have gotten in there.’ We’ve just got to learn from those. It’s a fine line — when you get the ball on the inch, you just want to punch it in real quick. In hindsight, maybe he was in and we could have given ourselves a chance.”
On this one, it sounds like personnel up in the booth needed to relay to Taylor whether or not to throw a challenge flag and the communication simply wasn’t fast enough. That’s reading between the lines, at least.
Either way, it’s somewhat fitting that clock management and communications that might have actually wound up winning the game were struggling alongside everything else besides the defense.
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