The Bengals’ season is all but over before December, as the team failed to “finish” another winning game on Sunday night. Tee Higgins had a monster outing against Los Angelese in his return from injury (nine catches, 148 yards, one touchdown).
Still, at the time of writing, Cincinnati is in the AFC’s tenth seed after the 34-27 loss.
“I don’t think we need to change anything,” Higgins said of the team. “We’re playing really good football. If you look at the stats, on both sides of the ball, like today, we were playing really good football. I don’t know what it is, man, we’ve just got to finish it. That’s the word. ” That’s the word for this week: finish the damn game. So as long as we do that, everything will be fine. It’s obviously a tough loss. On to those guys over there. I’m not going to discredit them. They played a great match. We just have to figure it out, and come back next week, in two weeks, and finish it.”
It’s a good thought and the right message, but completely wrong. Cincinnati needs to start, hang in and finish, but failed to do that again on Sunday night as LA raced to a 24-6 halftime lead. The defense has been terrible this season. Both sides of the ball do not carry the same weight.
Good teams win close games and bad teams lose them.
Cincinnati is 1-6 in one-score games this season. That’s a bad football team that needs help now to make the playoffs, while probably having to win every game for the rest of the season to make it.
“Take it one week at a time, you know, rest next week,” Higgins said of what’s next for the team in likely its last few months as a Bengal. “Figure out what we need to do now and come back on December 1 and try to start there with a 1-0 lead.”
