In 2025, the Cincinnati Bengals will need to fix their string of horrific starts. Head coach Zac Taylor has just one win in the first two games of any season during his tenure. So, that’s six seasons with a 1-11 record for the opening pair of games. That’s putrid and can put your team behind the eight ball a little bit to start the year.
Taylor, like many NFL head coaches, doesn’t like to play his starters during the preseason. But comparatively, it seems like he’s especially careful in sparsely using his first-team guys. All-Pro wide receiver Ja’Marr Chase was asked about the preseason and the team’s incredibly slow starts.
Is there any correlation between the two?
“Sounds like we need to play in the preseason, huh?” Chase said after the first day of OTAs.
Last year, the Bengals played their starters for one offensive series during the preseason opener against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. That was it. Other than that, during Taylor’s regime, the starters played for three plays all the way back in 2021 and Chase dropped a screen pass.
“It wasn’t a great screen,” Chase joked when reminded of the play by reporters. “I remember what happened now.”
In 2024, the Bengals started 0-3 and ended up with a 9-8 record. As if 0-3 wasn’t bad enough, they dropped the opening game at home to the New England Patriots. Yes, the Patriots, who would go on to win four games in an extremely dismal season. Those three losses to start the year absolutely cost the team a playoff berth and ruined incredible individual seasons from Chase – triple crown winner in the NFL for catches (127), yards (1,708) and touchdowns (17) – and quarterback Joe Burrow, who threw for 4,918 yards, 43 touchdowns and nine interceptions. Not making the postseason with those two performances alone is almost hard to do.
Slow starts can kill a team’s season
Starting 0-2 can really be a problem. Can you overcome that? Sure, we’ve seen it. But, only three teams have ever won it all following 0-2 starts.
The 1993 Dallas Cowboys famously started the year 0-2 during Emmitt Smith’s contract holdout (rookie Derrick Lassic started in his place) and they went on to beat the Buffalo Bills (again) to win the championship. The 2001 Patriots began 0-2 and later beat the St. Louis Rams to win the Super Bowl that year (welcome, Tom Brady). In 2007, the New York Giants also got blanked in the first two games only to go on and stun the undefeated Patriots in Super Bowl XLII.
Starting out winless in the first two games puts an awful lot of pressure on game three. Ryan Phillips of Sports Illustrated says the odds of doing anything with your season after an 0-3 start are awful.
“As you would expect, dropping to 0-3 is far worse for a team’s playoff chances than starting 0-2, but the difference is dramatic,” Phillips writes. “Since 1990, 162 teams have opened the season 0-3 and only four of them have made the postseason. That’s 2.5%.
“Of those four teams, two wound up winning their divisions. That’s 1.2%. None of those teams that started 0-3 have won a Super Bowl.”
Bengals know they need to start better
Even if the Bengals don’t go 2-0 or 3-0 out of the gates, they need to do better than they have in the past six years. Chase missed all of the team’s training camp practices in 2024 due to a contract holdout, and he admits that it affected his early-season performance.
“I could say I wasn’t mentally ready to be on the field,” Chase said. “I was in my own head. You know what I’m saying? I wanted to play, but I was in my own head.”
That won’t be a problem for Chase this year since he signed a four-year, $161 million deal recently. And, he knows that achieving his goal of winning the AFC North will be helped tremendously by a quick jump out of the gates.
“My biggest thing this year, going forward, is making the playoffs, man,” Chase said. “We got to get to the playoffs. That’s my first step, but [the] team goal is to win the division.”
On his end, Taylor sounds like he’s open to mixing up his strategy of playing starters in the preseason (even if he ends up erring on the side of safety and caution).
“The one thing I do feel good about is playing our guys in the preseason,” Taylor said. “That’s always subject to change, depending on health and how things go with our team during training camp, but that’s one thing that we’ve openly talked about with our players, and I think will help us as we do it.”
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