Reality Checking The Zac Taylor Hot Seat Talk
Sam Greene via Imagn Images
As the Cincinnati Bengals suffered a crushing 41-38 overtime defeat at Paycor Stadium against the hated Baltimore Ravens on Sunday, moods were sour. The King of Bengals fans, 98 Degrees’ Nick Lachey, couldn’t stay silent anymore and chimed in on Twitter.
What a coaching choke job…..you get a TO in OT and run it up the gut three straight times to settle for a long FG? Beyond pathetic Zac. Absolutely unreal. Sorry Bengal nation, you deserve better. #WhoDey
— Nick Lachey (@NickLachey) October 6, 2024
Despite Lachey’s sentiment spreading like a fever among the fanbase after Cincinnati’s 1-4 start, head coach Zac Taylor does not deserve to be on the proverbial “hot seat” – yet. The calls to the contrary can be blamed on a phenomenon that is not unique to Cincinnati. In fact, it’s sweeping across fanbases nationwide, across multiple sports, only getting more and more intense each year. Despite this, we don’t have a name for this disease.
Until now. Folks, meet Hyperactive Championship Deficit Disorder. If you think you may be suffering from HCDD, Who Dey Nation, don’t worry. The cure is to take a breath and try to put things in perspective before calling for Taylor’s job.
If you think this is about to be a Taylor apology letter, it’s not. The Ravens game, of course, has been the gut punch that many fans feared would be coming, with the botched operation by rookie punter Ryan Rehkow – who had arguably been the best performer on the team before Sunday – sealing the deal. 1-4 is a bad spot, and no one can argue that point.
But while many fans may point to the three rushing plays Taylor called that preceded the failed field goal as the game’s death knell, they somehow forgot about the interception Joe Burrow threw on a drive that could have sealed the victory in regulation. And yes, while Lamar Jackson and Derrick Henry are the living embodiments of the phrase “you can’t stop him, you can only hope to contain him,” the 523 yards the defense gave up certainly didn’t help matters.
Of course, the Ravens game was just the latest in Bengals’ atrocities to start the 2024 season. You can be kind and say that Cincinnati has not been good. You can be harsh and say they’ve been awful. Either assessment feels accurate. The Athletic now gives the Bengals a 29% chance of making the playoffs, ranking 21st in the league behind the likes of the 2-3 Tua Tagovailoa-less Miami Dolphins.
Taylor is fully aware of this, declaring to the media in his Ravens’ postgame press conference that “people can write us off if they really want to. I’m not dumb enough to do that.”
While that may come across as a shot at the media (and possibly some fans), Taylor’s confidence reveals a couple of things. One, he can take the temperature of a despondent fanbase, but isn’t joining them. Two, he is not going to take shots at anyone in the locker room or on the coaching staff publicly. Three, he’s not going to give any appearance of giving up on the season. You can dismiss those as things a coach has to say publicly, but Taylor is one to choose his words carefully, a fact that should give his statement weight, and fans a modicum of hope.
You want to see a team that’s falling apart? Just look around the league. The New England Patriots, who beat Cincinnati in Week 1, recently scrubbed one of its own team podcasts after one of the team’s in-house reporters suggested there could be a “mutiny” if Jacoby Brissett remained the team’s starting quarterback. Philadelphia Eagles Jalen Hurts laid the hurt with his recent comments about head coach Nick Sirianni – and that isn’t the first time he’s raised eyebrows with his comments, either. Taylor doesn’t have that sort of thing happening in his locker room, which at 1-4, is a pretty solid indication of the team’s faith in him and each other.
“Faith,” interestingly enough, is the word that brings us back to the disease currently spreading throughout Southern Ohio. By definition, the word “fan” is short for “fanatic,” and for the better part of three decades, there was absolutely no reason to be fanatical about being a Bengals fan. As every long-standing fan – or even just someone who was onboard prior to the team drafting Burrow – knows, the team had one of the longest droughts in league history, not winning a playoff game from 1990 until 2021. That’s 31 years.
Taylor, however, not only snapped that streak, but got the Bengals to a Super Bowl in his second season as head coach. What was the encore? Getting the Bengals to the AFC Championship Game the following season. It took Taylor three years to double the franchise’s AFC Championship Game appeareances. And if not for some controversial calls that didn’t go the Bengals way, they may have returned to the Super Bowl AGAIN. Despite losing his franchise quarterback in 2023 for the second time in his coaching tenure, Taylor still got the Bengals above .500 with Jake Browning as his starter.
There are plenty of things for which Taylor deserves criticism. But for a franchise once nationally known as the “Bungles,” complete with fans wearing paper bags to games and living on rooftops waiting on victories, the team’s current 2024 record isn’t enough to be calling for Taylor’s job.
But after going from the NFL outhouse to the penthouse in 2021, Bengals fans want their Super Bowl NOW, the 30-plus years prior to 2021 be damned. It’s a classic case of HCDD. Bengals fans, now immersed in their own rivalry with Kansas City, wish that it was one of their own making headlines dating a pop star, having their quarterback and coach doing insurance commercials, and having everyone else hating their success. A taste of the big-time has effectively created a monster with no patience or perspective.
The Bengals – and yes, Taylor – must improve, or their 2024 season is pretty much a wrap, despite what the locker room and coach believe. But instead of calling for Taylor to be on the hot seat this early into the 2024 season, Bengals fans need to take a chill pill – for now.
And hey, things could be worse. You could be a Cincinnati Reds fan in a year where your Opening Day starter was traded by midseason, the rest of the rotation all spent time on the injured list, all while your owner’s Hapsburgian Prince of a son taunts you, asking “Where you gonna go?”
Up Next