Cincinnati Bengals Preseason: 3 Takeaways vs Buccaneers
By Kenn Korb
Taking a look at three areas of interest following the Cincinnati Bengals 23-12 win over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in Week 1 of the 2017 NFL Preseason.
The first week of the preseason has come and gone, and in the Cincinnati Bengals opening contest we got to see our first glimpses of how this year’s iteration of the Bengals will actually look in game action.
Of course, this is the preseason, so everything we do witness should be taken with a grain of salt. The usual starters played maybe a couple of drives (if that), and will likely continue doing so in all but maybe one of these contests. The playcalls and schemes, as they tend to be in these contests, were pretty vanilla on all sides of the outing.
That makes sense for obvious reasons. Coaches here and elsewhere obviously don’t want to give away too much when the games don’t matter to the regular season standings and postseason goals. They also want to mitigate the injury risk as much as possible for those players who have proven themselves and know their roles. It would be ridiculous to put core players like Andy Dalton or A.J. Green out there for long stretches when they are so key to Cincinnati’s success and an injury to one of them would derail the season before it began.
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Despite its bad reputation, though, the preseason does come with plenty of value and purpose if viewed correctly. Preseason Week 1 was a good start to prove that true, and it has provided some early insights on every team, including these Cincinnati Bengals.
In this game against the Buccaneers, there were 19 total drives and over 100 different players who showed up somewhere in the box score by the end of things, so there’s plenty of action to search through. Though it would be too early to assume what has been shown through one game is enough to determine the answers teams are hoping to figure out about their players, it could be the first step to finding it.
In that regard, I’ve got a few takeaways of my own about what the results of this game could mean for Cincinnati moving forward.