Bengals Take Stock of Five-Turnover Performance and Where Things Turned From Aggressive to Reckless

CINCINNATI – Cincinnati Bengals head coach Zac Taylor knew he was repeating himself, but every question about every failure in Sunday’s 48-10 disaster in Minnesota kept coming back to the five turnovers.

Monday, Taylor said it would be “fantasyland” to say the Bengals would have won the game without the turnovers.

That wasn’t the point he was trying to make in bringing them over and over again.

The turnovers were the reason a bad day turned impossible in the span of a couple of minutes.

And that assessment hadn’t changed nearly 24 hours later.

“It sounds like a broken record, but I just see a big old 5-0 in the turnover margin that just led to a lot of that,” Taylor said Monday. “Really never gave ourselves an opportunity to have momentum, have confidence. When every bit of momentum you get is then taken away, it's tough.”

In addition to the five turnovers, the Bengals had another two fumbles they were able to recover.

The last time the Bengals had five fumbles in a game was 2013 against Green Bay.

As was the case Sunday, the Bengals lost three of the five fumbles in that 2013 game, but they still managed to win, clinching the game on a fumble-return touchdown by cornerback Terence Newman.

“It's not something that has been really in our DNA as ball carriers,” offensive coordinator Dan Pitcher said, adding that he dove into some stats to back up the anecdotal evidence.

Taking strip sacks out of the equation, Pitcher said it had been more than 800 offensive snaps since the Bengals put five fumbles on the ground.

And more than 900 since they lost three.

“Sunday, we did it in a span of 35 plays,” he said.

The surprising part when watching the fumbles is that none of the players who lost them – Noah Fant, Ja’Marr Chase and Samaje Perine – were being carless with the ball.

In fact, it took a painful chop to the right thumb of Perine to cause his fumble, resulting in the running back and kick returner being knocked out of the game with the injury.

“Minnesota deserves credit. Particularly (Isaiah) Rodgers, obviously, he had a great day for them,” Pitcher said. “They went after the football, and they got it off of us.

“On none of them did it feel like (our) guys were being reckless or egregious,” Pitcher added. “But on each and every one, there's something a little bit ... if your primary focus was making sure that you ended the play with the football, there are things that each ball carrier could have done a little bit differently at the end of all those runs that would have assured that that happened.”

It was the fifth career lost fumble for Perine on 659 scrimmage touches.

It was the fourth for Chase on 435.

And it was just the second for Fant on 315.

The last time the Bengals lost fumbles on three consecutive possessions in a game was 2020 in a Week 14 loss to the Cowboys (Gio Bernard, Trayveon Williams, Alex Erickson on the first three drives of the game).

“It's our job to make sure that we're doing those things in practice, that we're making sure the scout team is punching at the football,” Pitcher said. “Because I promise you, there's a coach in Denver right now that's putting that cut-up together, and they're going to show their guys. That's what happens. That's the league. You are what you put on tape.

“I don't think that's who we'll be moving forward, but we can't just sweep it under the rug,” Pitcher added. “We’ve gotta do the work.”

The situation is similar with quarterback Jake Browning after throwing two more interceptions.

Browning has five interceptions on 59 attempts since taking over for injured starter Joe Burrow in the second quarter of the Week 2 win against Jacksonville.

The first interception Sunday, snared by Rodgers, went back 87 yards for a touchdown and a 14-0 lead with 6:08 left in the first quarter.

“I thought I saw Chase (Brown); he (Harrison Smith) got a hand up on it last second,” Browning said when asked the interception. “For me, it's just finding ways to survive those plays with incompletions and throwing the ball away.”

Pitcher called Browning’s decision to throw the pass “reckless.”

“He's trying to make a play. That probably stepped over the line from aggressive to reckless in my opinion. And I think he would agree,” Pitcher said. “There was just a lot of bodies right there, and he's trying to make a play in an extended situation.

“I told him after the game, and again today, 'If we're gonna be the team we want to be and get to where we want to go, we're gonna need Jake Browning to make some throws,’” Pitcher added. “We can't just operate tightly and not go play freely. We have a lot of really talented guys we have to get the football to in the pass game. We don't want to impose that on Jake. But Jake also knows that has to be balanced with taking care of the football. And that was a point in time where he should have done something different with the ball.”

Sunday was the third game of the Taylor era with at least five turnovers.

In the previous two, ball security was good the following week.

After Joe Burrow threw four interceptions and lost a fumble in the season-opening loss to Pittsburgh in 2022, the Bengals did not commit a turnover in Week 2 at Dallas.

And after a five-turnover performance in a 34-13 loss to the Patriots in 2019, the Bengals had just one the following week in a 38-35 overtime loss in Miami, aka the Burrow Bowl.

“You can say it is an anomaly to have five balls on the ground in one game when we have had, I think, three in the last seven (games). It is what it is. They saw an opportunity to hunt the ball and get it out. There was something there with us.

“We did not do a good enough job securing it,” Taylor added. “We have watched the TV copy, showed the team the TV copy of every single one of them and none of them were outlandish separation, ball below the elbow. It was all stuff that we talk about. They just did a great job punching, grabbing wrists, getting the ball out and then feasting on that. Once they created the momentum it was easy for them. It just became fun for their defense. We didn’t do anything to counter that.”