Bengals: Flacco, Hendrickson remain day-to-day, status unclear for Sunday’s game against Chicago

Flacco said after the game he had landed awkwardly on the shoulder when he took his only sack of the day on the Bengals’ second-to-last series. He was seen running back to the locker room as the Jets began their game-winning drive, but was back on the sideline by the time they were kicking off following Breece Hall’s touchdown pass to tight end Mason Taylor and the ensuing PAT.

Flacco finished out the game but could not complete the comeback.

In his postgame press conference, Flacco said he was focused on getting back into the game and felt “good.” It’s not surprising, though, that he would feel sore the next day.

“We’ll see,” Taylor said. “We’ll take it day to day. It was a shoulder issue. He came back, and so again, sore today, certainly. And we will continue to work through the week.”

Flacco did not have the shoulder wrapped coming out of a team meeting Monday when he walked through the locker room during media availability time.

Taylor said Trey Hendrickson also remains “day to day,” after exiting at the end of the first half due to a re-aggravated hip injury. He likely was playing through “quite a bit” of pain during the game as it was, but he took a hit that left him walking gingerly off the field as New York kicked a field goal to end the half.

Linebacker Shaka Heyward was wearing a protective boot on his injured leg on Monday, which Taylor said will keep him out for “multiple weeks.” That will be a big hit to special teams, like Hendrickson’s absence has been for the defense.

Hendrickson initially injured the hip before halftime of the Week 6 game at Green Bay, and he was inactive Week 7 against Pittsburgh and seemed to be doing OK as a limited participant in practices last week. It’s likely no coincidence the production of the defense dropped off in the second half Sunday, but the issues go beyond one player.

Taylor and defensive coordinator Al Golden were left searching for answers as to why the defense has struggled so mightily this year. Missed tackles have become a prevalent issue over the past few weeks, and for the month of October, the Bengals rank among the bottom six in almost every major defensive category, most notably last in expected points allowed (EPA) per play and points per drive.

“For me, … the first half of that game, so many plays I’m really proud of, you know, but we cannot, for whatever reason, we cannot get rid of the inconsistent ones that break your back,” Golden said. “And I gotta break through there and give them a path to success there that’s on me and just eliminate those plays. There’s really great things on the other side of that, if we can just eliminate a couple of those plays. They end up being catastrophic for you. You string together however many good plays in the first quarter, and then you give them one or you give up a third-and-10 before the half that leads to points, you know, that kind of thing. So, we just have to eliminate those.”

Cincinnati leads the league with 81 missed tackles and a 13.3 missed tackle percentage through Sunday’s games.

Linebacker Demetrius Knight Jr., one of the few defensive players that hung around for interviews Monday after a players’ only meeting, said the tackling issues come down to technique.

“At the end of the day, you’ve got to rely on your technique, the basics,” Knight said. “We talked about it this morning that Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant relied on mastering the basics, and when you get away from those, like it’s easy to, you find fault in those, but once you master those, you begin to take strides you know you can make. We know what we have, we know who we are, and right now, we’re just going to focus on the basics and mastering those fundamentals so we can be in better positions, finish and close out games and help out the offense like we know we can.”

The Bengals had a 15-point lead in the third quarter and 14-point cushion with 10:24 left and lost 39-38 to a winless Jets team.

Asked if Sunday’s game is the result of relying on too many inexperienced players on defense, Taylor said that’s part of it but the Bengals are trying to get those guys experience in a hurry. Taylor is looking for players to step up and to hold one another accountable, but he’s at least encouraged in that he doesn’t see a lack of desire or effort.

“One thing you look at when you’re having the struggles we had on defense yesterday in terms of giving up the points, you look at the effort, it’s not an effort (thing), it’s not a want to, it’s not a guy’s checking out,” Taylor said. “It wasn’t perfect all the time, but there were moments there in the fourth quarter I saw 11 guys swarming to the ball, and if we’re going to continue to build off of that, we’re not going to run from the fact that it wasn’t good enough. We got to get some stops and keep the points off the board. There’s some opportunities we had where we’re an inch away and we didn’t take advantage of that inch and they did. And so that led to seven points or led to three points when we could have been off the field and those are things that we’ll be better for in the future.”

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