Personally, I just laughed. I know, I know, I should have had a rage-gasm after watching the hapless Bengals defense pinball off the Bears’ rookie tight end Colston Loveland, allowing him to waltz in for the winning 58-yard touchdown with 17 seconds left in Sunday’s mind-altering 47-42 loss to Chicago. But the truth is I wasn’t surprised.
Once the Bengals went ahead in insanely dramatic fashion with 54 seconds to play, it was obvious they’d in turn surrender the game-losing points. Indeed, my immediate reaction after the Joe Flacco-to-Andrei Iosivas TD giving Cincinnati the lead was to hope the Bengals were smart enough to allow Chicago to return the ensuing kickoff for a touchdown and give the Bengals the game’s final possession. Alas, they did not.
I would like to at least thank Al Golden and his defensive charges for getting me off the hook. I was operating on the premise that my presence at last week’s Jets debacle was the absolute rock-bottom for the bedraggled defense. Who knew the unit was the Mariana Trench? Golden and his feeble defenders are like Ed Harris in the movie The Abyss, sinking so deep they may need extraterrestrial assistance to return to the surface. One week after getting worked by rookie OC Tanner Engstrand, Golden was pantsed by Ben Johnson in the play-calling equivalent of having a “Kick Me” sign taped to his back. Cincinnati gave up an unthinkable 576 yards to the Bears’ work-in-progress attack to fall to 3-6 on the season.
How is it possible this defense is so sinful? Last year’s disparaged and discombobulated unit that cost the team a postseason berth and got Lou Anarumo fired had a DVOA of 6.4%. (Remember, on defense it’s better to be negative.) That was bad, yes, but nowhere close to the league’s worst number, posted by Carolina at 19.2%. After nine games, however, the 2025 Bengals have a defensive DVOA of 29.2%! That’s miles worse than not only last year’s unit or last year’s league-worst unit but also the all-time worst defense by that metric, the 1986 Buccaneers (24.7%). Since the turn of the century, the worst defense has been the winless 2008 Lions, at 22.4%. Golden’s Greenhorns will have to work hard to not go down in infamy.
The Bengals’ identity since its inception under offensive genius Paul Brown—and through Bill Walsh, Sam Wyche, and a host of excellent quarterbacks and wideouts—has always been offense-first. This year’s bunch is taking that to new levels. Cincinnati now owns three of the worst four defenses through nine games since 1978 (that’s as far back as we have DVOA calculations). The 1979 49ers were slightly worse at 29.6%, then come our heroes from this season, from 1998 (26.7%), and from 2019 (26.4%).
Is there any room for optimism, misplaced as it may be? For better or worse, another historical pattern throughout Bengals history is one of slow starts followed by strong—if ultimately futile—finishes. Indeed, Zac Taylor’s debut season in 2019 saw a marked second-half improvement on defense, to 14.5%. It should also be noted that both the 2019 Bengals and the 1979 49ers were in the Super Bowl just 18 months after these horrific defensive stats (the Niners of course defeating the 1981 Bengals in the Big Game).
Defense is always much more volatile than offense from year to year, the latest example being the Jets, who built a top-five defense in 2023 only to see it crumble, followed by Tuesday’s trades of their two best defenders for future draft capital. New York is currently the third-worst defense at 13.3%, giving Cincinnati a target to shoot for. You would always much rather try to salvage a bad defense than a bad offense—the Flacco Bengals over the last month are immediate proof of that concept.
Of course, the Bengals got there via a free agency spending spree that can’t be replicated at present with their stars pulling down top dollar. There is money to spend, but not nearly such a blank check. It’s nothing a creative and smart front office couldn’t overcome, but those are two adjectives not generally associated with Cincinnati’s “brain trust.”
As alluded to above, the shame of it all is that the Bengals are in the midst of an equally impressive, if not historic, offensive explosion. Flacco’s advanced metrics show an incredible turnaround after moving down from Cleveland. With the Browns, fronting a unit as impossibly bad on offense as the Bengals are on defense, he posted a -51.4% DVOA and -434 DYAR, numbers so shockingly awful any fan could come out of the bleachers to match them.
But in four games with the Bengals, Flacco is at 18.5% DVOA and 356 DYAR. The latter is a counting stat; for context, that puts him almost exactly equal with Lamar Jackson (357 in five games), well ahead of Justin Herbert (265 in nine games), and almost double Aaron Rodgers (189 in eight games). Matthew Stafford leads the league with 855 in eight games; if you extrapolated Flacco’s play with Cincinnati to an eight-game stint, he would rank fourth in the NFL.
And remember, Flacco’s debut first half in Green Bay scarcely counts, a scoreless shakedown cruise that the 20-year vet quickly put behind him. In the ensuing 14 quarters, he and the offense have scored a remarkable 129 points, or nine points per quarter! The best the 2024 Bengals, with Joe Burrow at the helm, put up in any equivalent stretch was 123 points, during the frustratingly similar four-gamer against the Raiders, Ravens, Chargers, and Steelers (that 16-quarter total of 140 points was higher, of course). And we all remember the Bengals went 1-3 in that quartet of games as well.
In other words, the Bengals, even without Burrow, have been playing offense over the last month at an exceptionally high level, better than any team in the league. Even the Colts, NFL points-scored leaders, don’t have a 14-quarter stretch that’s reached 129 points.
Which means that with just a single stop in the fourth quarters of the past two weeks the Bengals and Flacco would be near the top of the division, the story of the NFL, and perhaps even chesty enough to try pulling off a trade at the deadline in order to improve the defense. Instead, they are “sick,” an embarrassment, and susceptible to a locker room implosion at any moment. At least the team is must-see TV for Red Zone Channel viewers—the fourth quarters in the Flacco Era have produced 28, 27, 30, and 31 points.
We’ve reached the bye week, fortunately, during which the Bengals may or may not give up 40-plus points. As we all know, things tend to improve after the bye weeks—since 2021, the team is 23-9 post-bye, and that includes several games with Jake Browning at QB. Taylor and his staffs had deep-rooted issues that have undergone forensic study during bye weeks and came out improved in the past.
This defensive malpractice certainly feels worse than anything the team has dealt with before, though, and with Baltimore (x 2), Buffalo, New England, and the dreaded Steelers still on the schedule, dramatic progress seems unlikely. The more logical result in the season’s second half is an inevitable cooling off by the offense and Flacco, slightly better if still poor defensive displays that don’t feel quite as crippling because they don’t result in last-second defeats, and a Taylor/Golden Death Watch, along with steadily mounting pressure on Duke Tobin and the Browns/Blackburns.
The ownership group seldom responds to criticism, of course, but perhaps the idea of Joe Burrow suddenly thinking he’d actually be better off elsewhere with a properly functioning organization will light a fire under the front office. With that cheery thought, enjoy the bye week!
Robert Weintraub heads up Bengals coverage for Cincinnati Magazine and has written for The New York Times, Grantland, Slate, and Deadspin. He guests on Mo Egger’s radio show every Thursday in the 4 p.m. hour. Follow him on X at @robwein.
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