The loss dropped Cincinnati to 1-4, their playoff chances looking worse than that final, wounded duck of a kick by Evan McPherson after holder Ryan Rehkow bobbled the snap on what would have been the game-winning 53-yarder in overtime.
“The tale of the tape on us: we’re the Would-Be Kings,” Cappa said. “We’re four possessions away from having a great record. But the ball hasn’t bounced our way and ... we’re sitting at 1-4 and having to dig our way out of football hell.”
The Bengals four losses this season have come by a total of 15 points.
“We didn’t finish this game,” Cappa said. “We haven’t finished in any of our four losses.”
Afterward, some players felt like McPherson, who quietly admitted: “I’m just in total disbelief. This is shocking.”
Veteran defensive end Sam Hubbard tried grabbing hold of a silver lining — which proved easier than corralling Baltimore’s superman quarterback Lamar Jackson.
He claimed his team is full of guys who hold themselves accountable: “We’ve got the right locker room. We’ve got guys who aren’t going to turn on each other.”
He’s likely right — at least for now ― but some players were perplexed by the way things transpired in overtime, and you sensed some fissures coming with frustration.
After the loss, head coach Zac Taylor said he believes the Bengals are a “championship-caliber team.” He also thought his defense had “shown enough.”
But the Bengals gave up 520 yards to the Ravens.
And Cincinnati quarterback Joe Burrow — who had a career-best five touchdowns passes and a season-best 392 passing yards Sunday —had a different take than his coach:
“We are not a championship-level team right now. We’re not.”
At his postgame press conference Burrow was asked if he felt there was enough accountability from the coaching staff to the players right now.
“Whenever you are 1-4 — whenever you’re in a tough situation — there are going to be tough conversations that guys aren’t going to like,” he said. “Those conversations have been had.”
Disaster in OT
One of the most pressing points immediately after the game was how Cincinnati handled what should have been the game-winning possession.
While Jackson again had been masterful against the Bengals — he, too, had five touchdown passes and is now 9-1 against them in his career — he had one miscue in overtime when, after guiding the Ravens to the Cincinnati 39-yard line, he fumbled a snap while taking a quick peek at the clock.
The ball skittered around and finally was picked up by Bengals’ linebacker Germaine Pratt, who took it to the Baltimore 38.
The next score would win the game, and Cincinnati chose to run the ball three straight times, picking up just three yards to set up McPherson’s final attempt.
To be fair, Taylor had called one pass play, but Burrow checked it off because he said they didn’t get the right look against the defense.
But with Burrow having a record afternoon and receivers Ja’Marr Chase and Tee Higgins having a field day against Baltimore — between them, 19 catches for 276 yards and four TDs — the Bengals chose to shy away from their strength.
Afterward that caused some consternation with the two standout receivers.
Asked about his thoughts on those final play calls, Chase paused a good while before answering:
“I felt like we should have tried at least one play to get the ball to one our playmakers — maybe me or Tee or Chase (Brown) — to try to get a first down. That’s what we’d been doing the whole game.”
Higgins agreed: “Personally, I think we should have gone a little more aggressive on first and second down — just to try to get Evan in better field goal range.
“We should have done a better job.”
Burrow dodged the question:
“I’m not going to second guess that. We were in field goal range.”
He’s right on the range.
They called McPherson “Money” because he’s built a reputation making pressure kicks like this.
He had a streak of 14 made field goals in the fourth quarter.
As McPherson prepared to take the game winner, Taylor called time out.
He said he wanted to better arrange personnel and while he might not have iced his own kicker, he could have put a little freeze on his rookie holder.
Rehkow is the team’s punter who doubles as the holder and afterward he admitted he may have had a little bit of an adrenaline overload.
When he got the ball from long snapper Cal Adomitis — who put some blame on himself because he said he sent the ball back “a little high and inside” — Rehkow lost his grip on it and the ball fell sideways on the ground.
“The snap was good,” Rehkow said. “It came back really clean. I feel like the adrenaline was maybe too much and I just didn’t get a super clean grip and tried to bring it down a little too quick.
“I tried to get it back up, but I just didn’t get my right hand out of the way fast enough. I didn’t give Evan enough time to kick it.
“I feel I let him down and let the team down a little bit. I feel it cost us the game.”
Everyone involved in the kick blamed himself, including McPherson, who made a valiant effort in an impossible situation
“None of the (focus) should be put on Ryan or Cal,” he said. “If anything, I didn’t put the ball through the uprights.”
He was already into his kicking motion when Rehkow was struggling to get the ball upright and he couldn’t slow his motion enough to make good contact.
But Adomitis put it in perspective: “It was just one play.”
And there were others that were just as costly.
With 3:09 left and Cincinnati leading 38-35, the Bengals had a chance to ice the game. They had the ball on the Ravens’ 33 when Burrow’s pass intended for Chase was intercepted by cornerback Marlon Humphrey.
Afterward, Chase took the blame and said he ran a wrong route.
And then there was the Bengals defense, which was burned for one explosive play after another. None was more costly than Derrick Henry’s 51-yard run right after the missed field goal in overtime.
That took the ball to the Cincinnati 6 and Ravens’ kicker Justin Tucker — who’d kicked a 56-yarder at the end of the game to send it to overtime — hit from 24 yards to win it.
Burrow, Jackson show
Burrow and Jackson put on a show, which didn’t surprise Hubbard:
“They’re always going to be epic. They’ve been in some classics. That’s what happens when you have two MVP-caliber quarterbacks.”
But the quarterback who’ll be remembered from this one is Jackson, especially after his mind-boggling touchdown pass to tight end Isaiah Likely with just 5:24 left in regulation and Cincinnati leading by 10.
With the ball at the Cincinnati 6, Jackson bobbled the snap and it took him two tries to corral it. By then, Hubbard was closing in on him.
As Jackson scrambled to his right, the Bengals’ 6-foot-5, 256-pound defender was hot on his heels.
And that’s when Jackson stuck a stiff arm in Hubbard’s face mask and managed to ram his would-be tacker to the ground.
Just as he was about to be drilled by Pratt near the sideline, Jackson threw back across the field to Likely, who had worked himself open in the back of the end zone.
“He’s the two-time MVP in the league, just an unbelievable player,” Hubbard said of Jackson. “There’s nobody who moves like him ... in the world probably.”
“You can’t make up what he just did.”
Yet, for all Jackson’s heroics, the game was right there for the taking for the Bengals and once again they came up just short.
“Nobody cares if you barely lost, we still lost,” Hubbard said. “There are no moral victories whatsoever. Your record is who you are.” The Bengals are 1-4.
They are in football hell.
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