Cincinnati Bengals: Notes, Takeaways from win over Buccaneers
By Kenn Korb
Return of Turnovers Highlights Necessity
Cincinnati started 4-1 this year in major part due to a defense which looked good off the strength of forcing turnovers. In the first five games this year, they forced eight of them — including three games with multiple turnovers (two vs. Indianapolis, three vs. Baltimore, three vs. Miami).
It turns out that without forcing turnovers though, this defense just isn’t all that good. The Bengals came into this game with a 3-1 record in games where they forced at least one turnover, while going 1-2 when they couldn’t force any. Suffice it to say: when they’ve gotten turnovers, they win; when they don’t they lose.
This game showed that off, but in the process ended up highlighting just how much Cincinnati needs turnovers for their defense to survive.
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The Bengals got to hold big leads of 21-0, 27-9, and 34-16, in major part due to a litany of interceptions thrown by Jameis Winston. His fourth of the afternoon gave the Bengals that 34-16 margin with 2:10 left in the third quarter. By anyone’s expectations, this should have been well over at that point.
Unfortunately, that’s when everything wrong with the defense reared its head. Ryan Fitzpatrick came in for Winston, and he nearly led a full-on comeback. He got four drives to attack, and he made the most of them. He got a field goal on the first drive (eight plays, 55 yards), hit a deep touchdown on the second (two plays, 68 yards), and then tied the whole thing up with a touchdown on his fourth drive (10 plays, 88 yards).
On each of those scoring drives, he really opened things up, hitting a 20+ yard play on each of them (20 yards to Chris Godwin on the first, a 72-yard touchdown to Mike Evans on the second, and a 27-yard completion to Evans on the fourth).
The FitzMagic was not the start of those issues, though. It may get lost in the turnovers, but Winston was moving the ball pretty well too when he didn’t hand the ball over to Cincinnati defenders. On the afternoon, Cincinnati gave up a ludicrous 576 total yards to Tampa Bay — an insane 450 through the air, paired with 126 yards on the ground to a team which hasn’t exactly been good at running the ball this year (29th in yards per attempt).
Cincinnati’s defense let the Bucs go 10-18 on third downs and 2-2 on fourth downs while converting 29 first downs in the contest. Fitzpatrick had three 20+ yard plays, but Winston had five of his own along the way too, and under both the offense was picking up 10+ yards on seemingly every other snap.
Based on game-flow, this could’ve easily become a loss — and maybe deserved to be — because of the inability of the defense to do anything to stop the opposition when they weren’t gifted the ball by Jameis.