Zac Taylor details why the Bengals' bye week comes at a good time
Week 7 is not quite the halfway point of the NFL season, but an ideal rest stop for the Cincinnati Bengals it will make. The Bengals enter their bye week at 3-3 with two important goals: Get healthy, and score more points. Starting with their health, head coach Zac Taylor gave an update on left tackle […]
Week 7 is not quite the halfway point of the NFL season, but an ideal rest stop for the Cincinnati Bengals it will make.
The Bengals enter their bye week at 3-3 with two important goals: Get healthy, and score more points.
Starting with their health, head coach Zac Taylor gave an update on left tackle Orlando Brown Jr., who re-injured his groin midway through Sunday's win over the Seattle Seahawks.
"Bye week came at a good time," Taylor said of his left tackle's injury. "So we'll get through this bye week, get through next week, see where he's at."
Taylor said Brown's injury came up during the game, prohibiting him from finishing after logging 37 snaps. Cody Ford ended up finishing the game in his place, earning praise from Taylor for his relief performance.
"He stepped in there at left tackle and performed well, did a good job in the run game and protections. I was pleased," Taylor said of Ford. "We felt comfortable with him as the as the preseason had unfolded. They take those reps, you know, they mix them around at practice, Frank [Pollack] does a good job of that to where it felt like he'd be the first guy in a tackle."
Clarity at left tackle aside, Taylor and the Bengals ran into a wall of sloppiness to close out their 17-13 win on Sunday. The success from a week prior out in Arizona wasn't enough to translate over the course of an entire game against a quality defense.
Before the schedule gets even more daunting, Taylor alluded to using the break to evaluate where the offense is at, and where it needs to go from here.
"Sure, that's always part of it," Taylor said of making changes over the break. "Assess what we're doing well, assess what we thought we should have been doing well that maybe we're not, and do we need to make tweaks? Do we need to call more of this or that? And so I think this bye week comes at a good time for us, six weeks in. That's a pretty good sample size to see kind of where we're at, maybe what other teams are seeing, and take a step back and make sure that we're continuing to progress in the right spot going forward."
The Bengals made it through Joe Burrow's calf injury without eliminating themselves from playoff contention. Barely scraping by with a mobile Burrow and full cast of weapons isn't going to cut it when the games get tougher and mean more in the standings.
How Taylor and the offense respond from the break will determine if this team is capable of achieving the lofty expectations placed upon them.
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