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The original was posted on /r/nfl by /u/TheReaver88 on 2026-03-15 21:37:57+00:00.
Team: Cincinnati Bengals
Division: AFC North
Record: 6-11 (3-3 Division)
Result: 3rd Place in AFC North; missed playoffs
This top-level post is designed to be a high-level read focused on a larger narrative. For more in-depth discussion, see the various links to the comment section below.
Season Overview
After a frustrating 2024 season that got out of hand early due to poor defensive play, the Bengals did precisely nothing in the 2025 offseason. As a result, our fans got to watch a frustrating 2025 season that got out of hand early due to poor defensive play.
This time, there was another problem: Joe Burrow got injured again. Backup Jake Browning played surprisingly poorly in his three starts, and the team traded for Joe Flacco to helm the QB spot until Burrow’s anticipated return in December/January. Flacco had some truly exciting moments; overall, he was good-but-not great.
But the QB carousel merely meant a worse record than in 2024. It was not why the season went south. See, the 2025 Bengals defense was historically bad for the first couple of months by almost any metric. Joe Burrow would not have saved this season any more than he could save 2024. It was mostly a lost cause, except for the fact that the AFC North was shockingly bad. As a result, there were glimmers of hope that the Bengals could win a weak division and sneak into the postseason… and anything can happen in the postseason when you have a great quarterback.
Yet time after time, even when the division handed itself to Cincinnati, the defense let the team down, and the Bengals compiled their worst record since before the 2021 Super Bowl season.
In Depth: Stats
2025 Offseason Review
It is impossible to tell the story of the 2025 Bengals without shining a massive spotlight on the free agency period and draft leading into the season. The Bengals executed one of the most incompetent offseasons I have ever witnessed from a pro sports franchise. Their choices were simultaneously cowardly and irresponsible. Even the popular opening salvo of the Chase-Higgins contract extensions contained some unnecessary front-loading that failed to take advantage of the ever-rising salary cap. Nearly every single decision in 2025 was ill-conceived, and as such this will be the most disproportionately lengthy (compared to my peers) portion of this review. It’s simply too important and too convoluted to gloss over as a sequence of players lost and added.
I am an optimistic sports fan. I simply find it far more interesting to think about how my teams might win as opposed to why they are doomed. Fandom is a hobby, and hobbies are supposed to be fun. I say all this so you understand my full meaning when I tell you that as the season approached, I felt an inescapable sense of dread regarding the raw quality of player talent on the defensive side of the ball. After a 2024 campaign in which Joe Burrow played at an MVP level but the Bengals missed the playoffs due to a miserable defense, the franchise did far less than the bare minimum to address the defense. Everyone who followed the preseason knew there was a problem. We knew the team didn’t do nearly enough to turn a bad defense into an acceptable one.
We knew that the Cincinnati Bengals’ defensive talent would once again be inadequate.
2025 Coaching Decisions:
Okay, this part isn’t as bad as the following sections, but it does add important context for later bad decisions. You see, Bengals ownership (read: “The Brown family”) wanted to know whether the problem was players or coaching, and I believe that when someone (Duke Tobin? Zac Taylor?) told them it was both, their little nepo brains exploded. “It can only be one or the other,” they must have insisted, so a portion of the coaching staff became the scapegoat.
- Defense: Lou Anarumo, once considered the best assistant coach on staff, had lost control of things by the middle of the 2024 season. He was fired on Black Monday 2025, and the Bengals hired former LB coach Al Golden, who had spent the previous three seasons as Notre Dame’s DC, to replace Anarumo. Additionally, the Bengals let go of defensive line coach Marion Hobby and linebackers coach James Bettcher.
- Offense: The only change made on this side of the ball was to the offensive line, long maligned in Bengaldom. Frank Pollack helped toughen the group up after they let the team down in Super Bowl LVI, but over time the O-line deteriorated, and Cincinnati finally went in a new direction. Scott Peters brought martial-arts techniques to the linemen’s hand swipes to help this group improve drastically… though, it took quite some time. The line endured some comical miscues early in the season, but the unit was one of the team’s strengths by late fall.
In-Depth: Coaching Changes
- Head Coach: The Bengals did not fire Zac Taylor, which is only worth mentioning because so many people believe they should have. Broadly speaking, I find any discussion of head coach firing to be supremely boring between January and August, when you can be 99.999% sure it isn’t going to happen. Even during the season I find this conversation a tedious distraction. But if you want my thoughts on Zac Taylor, you can find in the coaching review section below, and an expanded version here.
2025 Free Agency:
In-depth: 2025 Free Agency
The 2024 Bengals were bad against the pass and against the run. Most notably, they were awful at producing negative results from opposing offenses, but they weren’t really good at anything on that side of the ball. They were so bad that basically everyone acknowledged Joe Burrow would have been right there in the MVP race with Josh Allen and Lamar Jackson except the team went 9-8 and missed the playoffs. Cincinnati had an absolutely elite offense, but lost games due to an incoimpetent defense that was really, really bad at tackling.
On the offensive line, the 2024 Bengals struggled immensely at guard, where Cordell Volson and Alex Cappa posted some of the worst PFF grades for starting guards in the league.
So you’d think they would have gone out in free agency and fixed at least some of the holes. Well, I guess they signed nose tackle T.J. Slayton to a 2-year $14M deal, and they re-signed fifth-year edge Joseph Ossai for an extra year. They took a flier on linebacker Oren Burks for 2 years, $5M… see what I mean? There was basically zero effort to actually fix the defense.
As for guard, the Bengals signed journeyman Lucas Patrick to a one-year deal. That was it.
It was as if the front office decided that after signing star receivers Ja’Marr Chase and Tee Higgins to huge extensions, they’d done their requisite spending for 2025 and would revisit the concept of winning at a later date. Cap space be damned. No indeed, the Brown family told the team “we fired Lou Anarumo, so clearly you think the problem was coaching and only coaching and now you’ll have to figure the rest out. Need help in the pass rush? Draft someone. Need linebackers? Draft them.”
Well, we got to see how that approach played out…
2025 Draft
In-depth: 2025 Draft
| Round | Pick | Player | Position | School |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 17 | Shemar Stewart | DE | Texas A&M |
| 2 | 49 | Demetrius Knight, Jr. | LB | South Carolina |
| 3 | 81 | Dylan Fairchild | G | Georgia |
| 4 | 119 | Barrett Carter | LB | Clemson |
| 5 | 153 | Jalen Rivers | OT | Miami |
| 6 | 193 | Tahj Brooks | RB | Texas Tech |
- Shemar Stewart, DE, Texas A&M: The Bengals opened up their 2025 draft by selecting a pass rusher who had 4.5 sacks through his whole college career. There were (and still are) lots of reasons to think Stewart can be a valuable player who produces outside of the stat sheet, but Cincinnati willingly picked a highly raw and unrefined athletic prospect in what was generally believed to be a bit of a reach.
- Demetrius Knight Jr., LB, South Carolina. Speaking of reaches, Demetrius Knight was a player a lot of Bengal fans were excited about… as a potential third round pick. Cincinnati selected him way ahead of schedule on the grounds that “we had a second-round grade on him.” It turned out there was a reason every else thought he was a third-rounder. Knight was unnecessarily thrust into a starting job as a rookie, and he struggled mightily.
- Dylan Fairchild, OG, Georgia. This one they got right. The Bengals surprisingly passed on the other UGA guard in round 2, but Fairchild actually projected as the slightly better pass blocker by many scouts. He was also stupidly thrust into a starting role, but it mostly worked out here. Fairchild was generally quite good…
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