Cincinnati Bengals: 3 Reasons for loss vs. Jaguars in Week 9
By Kenn Korb
1. Third Down Failures
A discrepancy in third downs has been something which made the difference often for Cincinnati this year. Against Jacksonville, there’s no single thing which comes close to illustrating the difference in quality between the two teams. Cincinnati’s defense has consistently ranked in the 20s for opponent conversion rate this season, while the offense has been fourth-worst in the league. Meanwhile, Jacksonville has been top 10 on defense and offense in this regard.
If that seems drastic, prepare yourself: it bore out even more lopsided on the field.
Cincinnati’s defense faced 18 different third downs in this contest; of those, they allowed Jacksonville to convert on 12 of them. That’s a 66.7 percent conversion rate, which is incredibly bad on Cincinnati’s end (for reference, the Rams currently lead the NFL on the season by a decent margin with an offensive rate under 50 percent).
What exacerbates the problem further is how the Cincinnati offense couldn’t even make an attempt at helping circumvent that problem. In fact, they probably helped make it worse because of their sheer ineptitude. Cincinnati faced eight third downs with their offense. Of those eight, they managed to convert just one. One!
That’s a terrible stat on its own, but it really gets worse when you track how it affects things beyond that. You see, those numerous failures on third down meant a lot of very short drives. In fact, those drives were so short that Cincinnati managed just 37 offensive plays all game — tied for the fewest in an NFL game since 2010.
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With a defense that’s already had to shoulder the load this year just to keep Cincinnati competitive ending up on the field for more than 40 minutes of game time because of their offensive counterparts’ failures, it’s no wonder they consistently found themselves coming up short when trying to end Jacksonville’s drive early.
They can’t possibly fare worse on this critical play going forward, but if they haven’t fully given up on the season yet they’ll need to actually find a way to make immediate, marked improvement against another AFC South opponent in the coming week.