The 2025 season has been a waking nightmare for the Cincinnati Bengals. The team has fallen to 3-7 after a brutal loss to the division rival Pittsburgh Steelers this past Sunday. It's the latest defeat in a three-game losing streak that began with an improbable collapse to the winless Jets.
Something very familiar about all this. Oh right. It feels like a continuation of the 2024 season, where the offense was incredible for most of the year, but the defense couldn't hold up, resulting in a 9-8 record that wasn't good enough for the playoffs.
With the Bengals' 2025 campaign well on its way to another missed postseason berth, that will be three straight years with no playoff football for Cincinnati. Remember those back-to-back AFC Championship appearances in the 2021-22 and 2022-23 seasons? They feel like distant memories.
After three years with no results, many fans are starting to get frustrated with head coach Zac Taylor. Taylor is generally known as a likable guy with a penchant for building a good locker room culture and saying the right things at the right times.
After 3 straight seasons with no playoff success, however, Taylor's words are starting to ring hollow.
Is Zac Taylor to blame for the Bengals' struggles?
Yes and no. I think whenever you have a team that is consistently underperforming, as the Bengals have for the past 3 years, it's never the fault of just one person or one thing. The Bengals have had some poor injury luck in those seasons, as star quarterback Joe Burrow has missed significant time in two of those three seasons.
The front office is also equally as much to blame for not giving Taylor and the other coaches the best players to work with consistently. This article from Stripe Hype's Matt Fitzgerald shows how Duke Tobin has consistently failed to make the right moves at the right times to help out his coaching staff.
At some point, though, the head coach must take responsibility for the play of the team. Week in and week out, Zac Taylor shows up to the podium and says how much the team needs to win and how they're going to do everything in their power to fight and scrape out a win. Those words don't seem to translate to the field every Sunday, however.
When I watch this team, I don't see a team that is fighting to the last inch to win a game. I see a team that is consistently making basic mistakes to lose a game. According to an X post by ESPN Insights, the Bengals are the first team to score 38+ points in back-to-back weeks and lose since the Giants in 1966, 59 years ago.
The Bengals are the first team to score 38+ points in back-to-back games and lose both since the 1966 Giants. pic.twitter.com/8FUk99Tuax
— ESPN Insights (@ESPNInsights) November 2, 2025
Does Zac Taylor control the locker room?
I think this is a fair question to ask at this point. When you see coaches like Dan Campbell talk about his team's "biting your kneecap off," you believe it because you see it on the field.
When players say that Mike Vrabel is willing to go to battle for them, you believe it because you can see it. Zac Taylor continues to say the same things: that the team is going to fight for wins and the defense is going to step up when they need to, and for nearly two full seasons, we have not seen that play out on the field.
I think that Matt Fitzgerald hit the nail on the head with his recent article about some of the positive qualities of Taylor, how he takes plenty of criticism, and always seems to defend his players. This was great when things were working out, but as that piece says, with how poorly things have been going for three straight years, it's up to Taylor to force changes. Whether this means firing coaches, changing schemes, or shaking up the depth chart,
Taylor should be doing everything in his power as head coach to try to fix the defensive problems. At least then he can say he did all he could, and it falls back to the front office for not providing him with enough talent.
What should the Bengals do next?
I personally have been a defender of Zac Taylor for a long time. I remember the pain of the Marvin Lewis era, always seeming to be good enough to get to the playoffs yet never advancing, and I didn't want to cast out the first coach who showed us postseason success in my lifetime.
I've defended Zac as one of the most underrated coaches in the league. However, Taylor needs to lead the team back to the playoffs to put some of the narratives about him to rest. That looks increasingly unlikely, and will at least generate some speculation about Taylor's future.
In the end, I like Zac Taylor. I think he's an easy guy to root for, and to say he had nothing to do with the team's success in 2021 and 2022 would be unfair to him. Football is a team game, and teams win and lose together.
Duke Tobin should be the first person out in Cincinnati at the end of this season (or sooner, preferably). I think that the team should give serious consideration to moving on from Zac Taylor and most of his staff as well.
The fact that the defense can't even do simple things like tackling right is a really poor reflection on the coaching staff as a whole. I think the Bengals need a new attitude to take over that locker room. It's no longer time to have a coach who's your friend; it's time to have a coach who says that the team will fight for every last inch and means it.