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Nov. 27—CINCINNATI — The game clocks went kaput for much of the second quarter at Paycor Stadium on Sunday. Finally, the head official had stadium officials just shut them off until they could be fixed.
But while you couldn’t tell anything from those overhead video boards that all were blank, you did get a sense of time if you looked out on the field.
The Cincinnati Bengals looked like they were back in 2018.
That’s the season they won five of their first eight games and then closed out the year losing seven of their last eight games to finish 6-10.
This was supposed to be a storybook Sunday.
Jake Browning — the Bengals back-up quarterback who had been thrust into the starting role with the season-ending injury to Joe Burrow 10 days ago in Baltimore — was finally getting a chance to return to the record-setting glory he once knew in high school and college, before these past five seasons in and out of the NFL and always in the shadows.
But fairy tales don’t happen in the NFL when you can’t run the football; you can’t stop the other team’s tight end; and when you put your inexperienced quarterback — with none of the diversion that comes with at least a semblance of a ground game — against the Pittsburgh Steelers defense led by game wreckers T.J. Watt and Cam Heyward,
Browning summed it up best after the Steelers overcame Cincinnati, 16-10, handing the 5-6 Bengals their third straight loss.
“The overarching themes of the season, those kinds of story lines are big for your jobs, but for my job, it’s just day to day and trying to get consistently better,” he told the assembled postgame press.
Although this was the first football game he’d started since he quarterbacked his Washington Huskies in a 28 -23 loss to Ohio State in the Rose Bowl in January of 2019, the 27-year-old Browning refused to lean into that kind of…
[ad_2]Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/tom-archdeacon-no-fairy-tale-151300216.html
Author : Dayton Daily News, Ohio
Publish date : 2023-11-27 15:13:00
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