Cautionary Tales & Never Fails: Patience paid off for Bengals coaches
AFC North lessons: Seaside Joe 1427
“You learn something from everyone you meet” - My brother Tony.
What can the Seahawks learn from other NFL teams this past season? I’ve been looking at some positives and negatives from each. Last time, I covered the AFC East and AFC West. Here are some of my takeaways from the AFC North, as the Bengals look to potentially reach the Super Bowl for the second time in as many years.
AFC North
Cincinnati Bengals
Never Fails: Patience before throwing coaches under the bus
Cautionary Tales: Overreaching for top free agents on defense
Shockingly, I don’t have much negative to say about the Bengals, so both of these lessons are positive ones for Cincinnati. Because when the Bengals needed to makeover their defense in 2021, owner/GM Mike Brown did what he usually does and similar to Pete Carroll, waited for the best values.
His biggest deal went to edge rusher Trey Hendrickson at four years, $60 million. Hendrickson has 80 pressures and 22 sacks since leaving the Saints.
The Bengals got Chidobe Aquzie for a three-year, $21.75 million contract; Eli Apple on a one-year, $1.2 million deal; and in 2020, they signed safety Vonn Bell and defensive tackle D.J. Reader, building around draft picks like Logan Wilson, Germaine Pratt, Jessie Bates, and Sam Hubbard.
Even former Seahawk Tre Flowers has played a few hundred snaps on Cincinnati’s defense in the last two years.
Without splashy moves, the Bengals have improved from 32nd in yards allowed in the final season of Marvin Lewis, to 29th, 26th, 18th, and now 16th in 2022, ranking sixth in points allowed and 11th in DVOA.
This is also thanks to defensive coordinator Lou Anarumo, now one of the stars of the team that has been a snowball of hype as Cincinnati keeps winning with a defense that doesn’t feature a single “Nick Bosa” or “Darius Slay” or “Chris Jones” on it. Is that because the Bengals fired somebody else to bring in a new defense and change everything up after going 6-25-1 in Zac Taylor’s first two seasons as head coach?
Nope. Expecting to be bad, the typically patient Mike Brown let Cincinnati go 2-14 in 2019, then 4-11-1 in 2020, without firing Taylor, Anarumo, or offensive coordinator Brian Callahan. It also wasn’t an easy road for the Bengals to get to the Super Bowl a year ago, at points getting blown out by the Browns and Chargers, but Brown let it play out.
Now the Bengals are on the cusp of another Super Bowl, with Callahan and Anarumo gaining steam as future head coaches. Yes, sometimes it is right to fire a coach or a coordinator, but often it seems like just the reactionary move for teams that nobody was even expecting to be good.
This is how Cincinnati reached a place of high expectations moving forward. The Seahawks are going into year 14 for Pete Carroll and seem prepared to keep the train moving with Shane Waldron and Clint Hurtt, which could still pay off.