The Cincinnati Bengals were one bad defensive holding call away from winning Super Bowl LVI in 2021, and they’ve been chasing that metaphorical dragon ever since. Philosophically, that’s a great idea.
They’ve built and maintained one of the best offenses in the NFL over the past five seasons, and they’ve centered it all around Joe Burrow. That’s a great start, yet in the four years since, their seasons have ended in more and more disappointing ways.
They lost in the AFC championship game in 2022. They missed the playoffs in 2023. They weren’t able to sneak into the playoffs in 2024. They weren’t competitive in 2025.
Every year that passes, it looks more and more like they are squandering what they have with Burrow. So let’s take a look at where they ended, what they’ve done, and what they need to do to get one of the best quarterbacks in the NFL to the promised land.
Where they ended
The Bengals' 2025 season was a wash from the get-go. In Week 2, Joe Burrow had a turf toe injury that made him miss 10 weeks. They threw Jake Browning out there for Weeks 3 through 5; he got absolutely shelled, and they traded for Joe Flacco.
Flacco came in and was solid. He only won the one game against the Steelers and lost the other five, but he still kept the offense functioning for the most part.
The Bengals ended their 2025 season with one hell of a death throe once Burrow got back at the helm. They beat the brakes off of the Ravens on Thanksgiving, lost to the Bills, laid an absolute stinker against the Ravens, smoked the Dolphins, smoked the Cardinals, and then pooed themselves in a Week 18 game against Shedeur Sanders and the Browns.
With Burrow, that offense typically scores a billion points, but they fell on their face twice in the last four games.
On one hand, you can say that it’s hard to take those results at face value because Burrow was coming back (weirdly quickly) from his injury. On the other hand, those two losses were against AFC North teams, and wacky stuff always happens in those games.
Regardless, they ended the season with a 3-2 record, but you could see that with a starting-caliber quarterback, this was an offense built to win. With Joe Burrow, the offense was built to win a Super Bowl.
In other news, grass is green, and birds fly.
The Bengals’ problem, as it has been for the past few years, is that their defense is terrible. Not only has it been at, or near, the bottom of the league … but the ways they crapped the bed were a unique brand of gutting.
You had the Bears game where the defense allowed Coleston Loveland to score a 58-yard touchdown with 17 seconds left to win 47-42. The week before that, they let the Jets… The Jets… score three consecutive times in the fourth quarter and come back to win 39-38.
And I don’t want to hear any of that, ‘The Bengals defense was actually average at the end of the season,’ talk. Sure, in the last eight games, they allowed an average of 24 points. But the last three games were against the Dolphins (21 points), the Cardinals (14 points), and the Browns (20 points).
The fact of the matter is that the Bengals needed to change a whole lot, and the vast majority of it needs to be on defense.
What they’ve done
This offseason did not start well for the Bengals, but it has turned around. The first thing that they announced was that they weren’t going to change anything or anyone on the coaching staff, which was wild.
That was mostly true. They did move Jordan Salkin from the assistant wide receivers coach to the assistant quarterbacks coach, and James Casey is now the tight ends coach and run game coordinator… but that’s it.
I can’t imagine Al Golden would’ve gotten fired since last year was his first season, but none of the position coaches or assistant coaches got canned. It’s crazy that guys who underperformed so violently were able to keep their jobs.
That leaves the players as the only avenue for change. The good news is that it’s going to be easy for the defense to make upgrades because the bar was so low. The bad news is that this free agent class, for the most part, isn’t spectacular.
On the first day of free agency, the Bengals signed two players: Boye Mafe and Bryan Cook. Making moves right as free agency opens is kind of weird: you’re going to overpay for guys, but in a thin class like this one, you want to make sure you get the best guys available.
Are Mafe and Cook elite players? No, but they’re on the upper echelon of available players. Those two signings were good… but that’s not early enough.
What they need to do
Let’s start with free agency since we’re still a little ways away from the draft.
The Bengals need a linebacker, and they needed him yesterday. They’ve missed out on the first wave of these guys, so names like Quay Walker, Devin Lloyd, Nakobe Dean, and Tremaine Edmunds are all gone. Now you’re looking at Willie Gay Jr., Bobby Okereke, and Logan Wilson as the potential bones of your defense. They are significantly lower-caliber players than the ones who were available.
They need help on the defensive line too, but they missed the first wave. Fortunately/unfortunately, the free agent defensive linemen aren’t spectacular as a whole. So they did miss out on David Onyemata and Kyhiris Tonga, but they still have plenty of options.
In the secondary, they’re going to have to be fine with bargain bin/lottery ticket free agents. They were never going to spend money on Alontae Taylor or Jaylen Watson, so it’d be dumb to say that they “missed out” on those guys.
That takes us to the draft. They simply have have have have to hit on draft picks. Since the 2021 draft (when they picked Ja’Marr Chase, Joseph Ossai, Cam Sample, and Evan McPherson), they have made 30 picks. They have maybe gotten six or seven players who aren’t liabilities, and two of them are first-rounders (Amarius Mims and Myles Murphy).
The NFL draft is a crapshoot, but missing at that insane of a clip is entirely unacceptable.
After they have a good draft, they need to develop those players, which is the tricky part. Part of the reason you hire a defensive coordinator from a college program is that they know how to work with young guys.
Al Golden was the DC at Notre Dame before he went to Cincinnati. So the assumption is that they not only liked his scheme, but also that he could work with their draft picks and turn them into studs. However, and this is a big part, the front office needs to stay out of the way of that.
Last year, they picked Shemar Stewart in the first round of the draft. Any draft profile that you read on him said that he needed to develop, and it might take a little time for that to happen. Naturally, he and the Bengals couldn’t agree on his rookie contract (something about nixing future guaranteed money if Stewart ended up “going to prison”), and he missed all of OTAs.
The Bengals have a lot of chances to get back on track and stop wasting Joe Burrow’s career. Getting talent in the building through the draft and free agency is tough, and developing that talent is even tougher… But making sure Duke Tobin, the Grima Wormtongue/general manager in Cincinnati, stays out of the way should be a very easy fix.