The Bengals are entering an intriguing season in 2021 but the NFL showed they don’t have much confidence in them, only giving them one primetime game this year. The one primetime game comes in Week 4 against the Jaguars on Thursday Night Football.
Every team gets a Thursday night game so this is disappointing for Cincinnati, as fans hoped that the addition of Ja’Marr Chase and the return of Joe Burrow after getting injured late during his rookie year would be enough to maybe land them a Monday night game or two. They were left off the Monday night slate and will only be playing a Thursday night game.
The storyline surrounding the Bengals/Jaguars is that it’ll pit the last No. 1 overall picks against each other with Burrow’s Bengals hosting Trevor Lawrence’s Jaguars. That’ll be a really fun game and will give NFL fans a glimpse of what the future looks like in the league.
No. 1 vs. No. 1
— Cincinnati Bengals (@Bengals) May 13, 2021
2020 National Championship Game rematch
Primetime in The Jungle
Thursday, 9/30 pic.twitter.com/KdpuQZhlpz
Bengals vs Jaguars should be fun but having just one primetime game is unfortunate.
After the rest of the AFC North made it to the playoffs a season ago, it felt like the Bengals would get a primetime game against one of them, but that didn’t happen. Their only primetime game comes against a team that won just one game a year ago, showing what the NFL thinks about the Bengals.
The good news is that Cincinnati has a chance to earn another primetime game as the season goes on. As we all know, games after Week 5 can be flexed out of Sunday Night Football and this tends to happen if a team underperforms or if there’s a matchup that people are dying to see in the late-night slot. The Bengals have taken advantage of this before and gotten flexed into Sunday night so maybe if they come out of the gates hot, they can earn another primetime matchup.
It’s disappointing that they’ll only have one game under the lights and that it’s so early in the year but the team did have a top-five draft pick this year and are the worst team in their division so maybe expecting more than the required Thursday night game was too much for Bengals fans.