Cincinnati Bengals: Takeaways from big loss in Week 7 vs. Chiefs

An Abundance Of Questionable Decision-Making

There were plenty of things to worry about for the Chiefs in this matchup coming in. Kansas City has an insanely good offensive attack, one which is primed to defeat even the best defenses (not to mention a middling unit such as Cincinnati’s). The Bengals were going to need to be at their best to stand a chance.

Unfortunately, that proved to be far from the case on Sunday night, and a startling amount of that reasoning is directly tied to the decision-making exhibited throughout the important elements of the team in this game.

Start with the quarterback. Andy Dalton has mostly been a positive force this season: 79.4 Pro Football Focus EDGE grade (subscription required), No. 7 in Football Outsiders’ DYAR and individual DVOA stats, 10th in QBR, and is on course to set career highs in pass attempts, completions, and touchdown passes.

This game, however, he strangely decided to revert into Bad Andy for the first time in awhile. He fell back into the old habit of focusing heavily on A.J. Green, and did so to an unusually absurd degree. Green ended up being the target nearly half of Dalton’s 29 attempts on the evening (14 of 29). At one point, he had been the focus of 10 of 20 passes thrown by his quarterback.

That sounds good in theory — how could getting your best playmaker the ball as often as possible not? But it turns out much worse in practice. It worked well initially, but even as the defense adjusted to Green getting so many looks Dalton kept trying to give it to him. It cost them offensive flow throughout the game, leaving the rest of his cadre of pass catchers as nothing more than clear decoys until the game was well out of reach.

It ruined drives as more and more of those passes went incomplete. It even directly gave Kansas City points too, as they easily intercepted a pass attempt meant for Green (who was tightly covered as it was, but also had defenders in between him and Dalton over the middle) and took it back for six.

Dalton turning into a pumpkin wasn’t the only issue, of course. Joe Mixon seemed to decide to try catching everything thrown his way with one hand. The defense kept missing tackles (especially Vontaze Burfict), with many of them seemingly attributable to players being more focused on trying to rip the ball loose than taking a guy down. The team went for a fake punt on their third drive, but the players involved were not on the same page at all.

Prior to the half, they not only wasted a field position gift (great play by the returner, by the way: he enacted a little-used rule which says if a player who’s out of bounds first touches the kickoff that it acts the same as if the kicker booted it out himself) by throwing three quick passes (two incompletions, stopping the clock) before punting, but they left that Kansas City offense 1:13 on the clock to score (and they did get a field goal).

What sticks most may be how quickly it seemed the team gave up on this game — essentially, they were finished with any hopes of this being competitive after how they went into halftime. Down 38-7 with over six minutes left in the third quarter, Cincinnati was in scoring range but stalled out in the red zone. Down by so much, they needed a touchdown to even pretend this game was within reach, but they just kicked a meaningless field goal.

That put them down 38-10, a four-score deficit against a ridiculous offense on the other end; it was over. Had they gone for a touchdown and got it, they’d have been down 38-14, a three-score deficit. Take what happened next drive (the interception of Mahomes), and see the offense manage to score a touchdown again (plus two-point conversion), and this could’ve easily been a two-score game (38-22) as the fourth quarter began.

The Bengals probably wouldn’t have won even with all that working out (KC is dominant on offense and had a big lead; they could’ve easily scored 50+ if they needed to), but it would’ve been a better use of everyone’s time to at least feign an attempt to win; even if it didn’t result in a win, it would’ve given Cincinnati a chance to practice their comeback mode offense in a real game situation.

As with just about every decision made by the Bengals in this contest though, their decision on how to go about the situation was very questionable.