Cincinnati opens the 2025 campaign at Cleveland on Sept. 7, seeking a Week 1 win for the first time since 2021. That overtime victory over Minnesota kicked off a season that ended in a run to the Super Bowl and was seventh-year coach Zac Taylor’s only opening win.
Slow starts have been a trend over the years, and Taylor is hoping he’s found a recipe to produce better results early in 2025 and beyond.
Credit: AP
Credit: AP
“I really like how it all played out for us,” Taylor said of the team’s preparation this summer. “We got tremendous work in. I really did like the schedule. The players would echo that. We’re in a really good position here ... I really like where we’re at. We got all the necessary work in. I thought it was the right decision to not have joint practices with anybody. As a whole, with a first-year defensive staff together, we’re at the right place we need to be this year. I feel good about how everything fell into place for us.”
The Bengals missed the playoffs the past two years, and a slow start especially came back to bite them in 2024 when a five-game winning streak to end the season wasn’t enough to get them into the postseason.
Shortcomings on defense hampered one of the league’s best offenses, and the organization moved on from defensive coordinator Lou Anarumo, hoping successor Al Golden could get more out of draft picks and talented young players who seemed to take steps backward last season.
The jury is still out on whether that will be enough. The defense had strong showings in practices this training camp, going against the likes of Joe Burrow, Ja’Marr Chase and Tee Higgins, but that didn’t carry over to preseason games, where tackling and giving up explosive plays were still an issue.
Taylor, Golden and several leaders on defense insist the practices are more telling of what to expect because Cincinnati stayed “vanilla” in games to avoid showing opponents what the new defense has in store.
“We’re being pretty vanilla on defense within the games, and there’s certain plays versus those coverages we’re running that don’t fit very well,” linebacker Logan Wilson said last week when asked why he believes the defense will be fine. “It is what it is. There’s still some things we should do better with technique and fundamentally sound. That’s part of the learning process. These practices are more realistic in terms of what we’re going to be like on defense.
“Every one of our practices have been more back and forth than the games (were),” Wilson added. “It’s hard. We only ran 10-15 percent of what we’re truly running. … It’s good we got those reps because we learn from those plays, for sure, so we’re just going to continue to learn from it and get ready for Cleveland.”
Getting the defense right, or even just average, is a must, but even the offense could improve its early-season production. Burrow has his own tendency to start off slow. That’s where other changes this summer could factor in.
The Bengals switched up the training camp routine to move practices from mid-afternoon to morning to help with heat and potentially get more out of the players. They also elected not to do joint practices with other teams, which ended up being treated like exhibition games for starters in the past, and instead gave more snaps to the first-teamers in actual preseason games.
Taylor said not having those joint practices enabled the Bengals to focus more on what they needed to work on, rather than playing an opponent. In giving starters more series in preseason (a total of five for the offense), Burrow and company had a chance to shake off the rust. Burrow led four touchdown drives but took two sacks, lost a fumble on one that was negated by a penalty, and now believes that’s out of his system.
Credit: AP
Credit: AP
“Some good learning experiences in the couple drives that we’ve had, got some fumbles out of the way, so that was good,” Burrow said after the second preseason game. “Yeah, those are just incredibly valuable reps that usually work out those kinks in the first couple weeks of the regular season, and we worked them out the last two weeks.”
Left tackle Orlando Brown said a sense of urgency was created back in April when the offseason workout program began and all of the main weapons were there.
Chase, who sat out last training camp, and Higgins both got contracts done in March, and the offense has been together since spring practices. Now, the last big piece is in place with defensive end Trey Hendrickson agreeing to a new contract for 2025, and the Bengals should be ready to go Week 1.
“Just in terms of our approach in April, which is a huge starting point for a team on this level, then it was a sense of urgency, and when a sense of urgency is created and it’s consistent throughout training camp, minicamp, OTAs, all of those, good things happen,” Brown said. “I’ve been thankful to be a part of some really good football teams and have some really good offseasons as a team, and that was important. We had that, and having everyone here (on offense). When you have your key contributors here, that’s huge, and I think it will end up paying big dividends with how we start the season.”
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