Ranking Bengals 2021 season schedule by opponent difficulty

Ranking Bengals Opponents by Difficulty

5. San Francisco 49ers (Week 14)

Despite finishing last year with a losing record, the 49ers aren’t a team to take lightly this year. Fortunately, the Bengals are only facing one team from the NFC West due to the extra game and not the entire division. That’d make a difficult schedule even more difficult.

The 49ers went from being one overthrown pass away from winning the Super Bowl to winning just six games last year. The reason for that was that they got hit hard by the injury bug in 2020, losing Nick Bosa in one of their first games of the season and later losing Jimmy Garoppolo due to injury.

All of the injuries caught up to the Niners and it also showed them that they needed to think about the future. They moved up to the No. 3 spot in the 2021 NFL Draft and took North Dakota State’s Trey Lance to sit behind Jimmy G for the foreseeable future.

Maybe Lance is the starter by Week 14, who knows, but no matter who the quarterback is in that game, the Bengals will have their work cut out for them. San Francisco’s defense is one of the best in the league and their run game is incredible. That game might be at home, but it won’t be an easy one whatsoever.