When you’ve spent decades rooting for a football team that seems to solely exist so it can disappoint, you don’t allow yourself to enjoy those precious few moments when things are going quite swimmingly. Disaster always lurks and even when the going is really, really good, history reminds us that something bad is going to happen.
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Which is why as soon as Randy Bullock’s third PAT attempt sailed through the Lucas Oil Stadium uprights, giving the Bengals a 21-point lead over the Colts early in the second quarter on Sunday, I started thinking about a game played almost exactly 24 years ago.
On Oct. 20, 1996, the Bengals blew a 21-zip second-quarter lead on the road and lost to the San Francisco 49ers. Aside from Steve Young’s touchdown run that gave the Niners the lead in the fourth quarter and the NBC camera shots of a bewildered David Shula looking helpless on the Cincinnati sideline, I really don’t remember much about the mechanics of the game, other than the fact that after four-and-a-half painfully bad seasons and a 1-6 record through the first seven games of ’96, it proved to be Shula’s last game as the Bengals head coach.
It’s never good when a team coughs away a 21-point lead and loses. It’s particularly upsetting when the concept of playing meaningful games close to Christmas is on the verge of being a pipe dream before Halloween. It’s especially problematic when a 21-point blown lead is overseen by a head coach who has no track record to boast of or equity to cash in on.
When you’re deep into the second season of your tenure and fans are still searching for reasons to believe in you, you’re better off not feeding into the doubt by choking away a three-TD edge to a team quarterbacked by a creaky 38-year-old who some have thought out loud about being a $25 million mistake.
Zac Taylor’s head coaching career is now 22 games old, and what I can tell you about him is he seems like a nice guy, that his team’s collective effort never waned last year in the face of a near-cataclysmic 2-14 season, and that, well, did I mention that he seems like a nice guy?
I can tell you a lot more about his performance over the past two games. In Baltimore, last Sunday, Taylor’s offense looked completely ill-prepared for a Ravens blitz that Joe Burrow said publicly was coming four days prior to the game. The Bengals continually tried to block Baltimore with five offensive linemen, a recipe for disaster for most teams, much less one in Year 5 of its odyssey to field a quality O-line. Taylor and his staff never adjusted, Burrow never stopped getting clobbered, and aside from a puny game-ending drive that resulted in a pointless field goal, the Bengals almost never scored.
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They did score against the Colts on Sunday in their 31-27 loss, on four consecutive drives to open the game. In fact, the Bengals’ offense looked as good and well-run as it has since before Taylor took over. Those first four drives had everything, from pinpoint intermediate passes from Burrow, excellent running from Joe Mixon and rare-for-2020 productivity from A.J. Green and Giovani Bernard, as well as actual downfield passes hitting their targets.
Is it a credit to their head coach that a week after the Baltimore embarrassment, the Bengals stormed ahead against the Colts? Sure, but Taylor has graduated from getting pats on the back for his teams performing well in isolated segments of games and his players trying really hard. He’s moved to the point where even if the criteria for assessing Taylor isn’t solely tied to wins and losses — Burrow’s development is an obvious factor — every coach ultimately gets graded based on how frequently their teams win, with the ones who earn the lowest marks being very complicit in its failures.
The Bengals failed at Lucas Oil Stadium, spectacularly and memorably, with their head coach playing more than just a supporting role. With his team trailing by a point midway through the fourth quarter, Taylor apparently signed off on a play that involved Samaje Perine getting his first touch of the season on a third-down-and-1 play from the Colts’ 30 yard-line. He then had Bullock attempt an ill-fated 48-yard field goal. Yes, Bullock had made a 55-yard boot earlier in the game, and it’s hard to crush any coach for electing for a makeable field goal that could give his team the lead. But a field goal can’t be the call on fourth down if on third down and the game hanging in the balance, the ball is going to be handed off to someone most of us forgot was even on the team.
The next offensive drive was set up for a coming-of-age moment for Burrow. Armed with three timeouts, he went to work from the Cincinnati 26 yard-line and smoothly guided his team into Colts territory, trailing by four. But with time wilting and the offensive operation starting to fluster, Taylor held on to two of his timeouts instead of using one to allow his rookie quarterback to get composed. There were two completions for 2 yards each, the second one coming out of no-huddle, then finally Burrow’s game-sealing interception to Julian Blackmon, a total of three plays muddied in disarray. Maybe a pause in the action could’ve lessened the confusion?
Instead, Taylor did nothing, which is what his defense did for the game’s final two and a half quarters. Coordinator Lou Anarumo might oversee the defense, but the continual lack of pass rush and the ways in which the Cincinnati back seven were carved up by Philip Rivers sure doesn’t reflect well on either Anarumo or his boss.
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Neither does a 3-18-1 record, which is what Taylor owns after Sunday’s fiasco. Maybe Taylor deserved a pass for the Bengals finishing with the NFL’s worst mark as a rookie head coach whose front office set him up to fail in 2019. But if the idea in Year 2 wasn’t to win a dramatically higher number of games, then why did they not only keep the team’s core of veterans together but add to it by signing easily the team’s most expensive free-agent class ever? And even if Taylor is still trying to build the “winning culture” he kept boring us by talking about a year ago, isn’t a key component to having said winning culture the occasional, uh, win?
I know that certain things have conspired against Taylor this season. He’s gotten little from his team’s highest-paid guys. Geno Atkins and Carlos Dunlap were non-factors again on Sunday, and even if Green played very well, he contributed little through the first five weeks. D.J. Reader is out for the season. Trae Waynes hasn’t played a snap.
But when an unproven head coach has just three wins in 22 tries, reasons quickly turn into excuses. Even if Taylor inherited a mess when he took the job, his fingerprints are starting to show. The offensive line coach he insisted on hiring is overseeing arguably the team’s biggest weakness, there is no clear identity to the team’s offense, and nearly a calendar year after Cordy Glenn was suspended for a game for “internal disciplinary reasons,” we’ve spent a lot of time over the season’s first six weeks wondering about the relationship between Taylor and at least one of his players.
But hey, he’s a nice guy, right?
So was the guy who took over for Sam Wyche in 1992, and perhaps the biggest problem for me is that for the second time in 12 months, I’ve felt compelled to mention Dave Shula’s name while writing about Zac Taylor’s team. The first instance was after the Bengals had face-planted to an 0-7 start last season that somehow evoked memories of truly forgettable teams.
And now we have a second, after a blown 21-point lead and a devastating road defeat that seemed like a direct descendant of the one in 1996 that mercifully brought an end to one of the worst coaching tenures in NFL history. It’s not good when you’re a fan of a team that’s winning by three touchdowns and you can’t shake the memories of a game played 24 years ago.
It’s even worse when you’re a head coach and you can’t shake the comparisons to the guy who was on the sideline of its losing team.
(Photo: Andy Lyons / Getty Images)