Zac Taylor on Joe Burrow’s Health, Thoughtfulness and the Bengals’ Defense

The Cincinnati coach tells the Kwamie Lassiter II story, his quarterback retrieving the ball for a rookie wide receiver’s first NFL touchdown, and why his defense is capable of lifting up its leader just as he has lifted the team the past few years.

There was a shot during Sunday’s Seahawks-Bengals broadcast on CBS that Joe Burrow would have no idea the cameras caught, a few ticks after he found rookie Andrei Iosivas scored his first career touchdown to give Cincinnati a 14–7 lead with 12:20 left in the second quarter.

Burrow had jogged over to Bengals coach Zac Taylor when it hit him. Out of seemingly nowhere, he planted his foot, and ran to a member of the officiating crew wearing a black vest and handling the footballs. The official saw Burrow and pointed to the end zone, where a ball was sitting on the turf. The quarterback retrieved it, ran it back over to the 5-yard line, tucked it under Iosivas’s arm and patted the rookie on the head.

He knew Iosivas would want to keep that ball, and he wasn’t going to let him lose it in the post-touchdown celebration.

Taylor on Burrow: “It just speaks to the way that these guys will do anything for the guy because he’s thoughtful. He does things for his teammates. Pretty cool.” :: Sam Greene/The Enquirer / USA TODAY NETWORK

The play that led to the score, if you look closely, was another example of how Burrow’s ailing calf is coming around, and the Bengals and Burrow are optimistic it’ll only keep getting better from here. Its aftermath, and an act Burrow probably figured would never see the light of day for most of us, is another reason why it meant so much to everyone else in that organization to help get the quarterback through all of this.

“That’s why guys rally around him—it’s because he’ll do anything for you,” Taylor told me over the phone about an hour after the Bengals survived a 17–13 prizefight with Seattle. “He does a great job. He gets along with everybody on the team. For him to throw the last play of the game last week to Kwamie Lassiter [II]… are you familiar with that story?”

I told Taylor I wasn’t.

The elder Kwamie Lassiter played 10 years in the NFL in the late ’90s and early 2000s, eight of them as a safety in Arizona. He passed away in January ’19. His son, also named Kwamie, has been with the Bengals since last year, bouncing back and forth between the practice squad and active roster over that time. As fate would have it, with Tee Higgins banged up, he dressed for Cincinnati’s Week 5 game against the Cardinals in Arizona.

“We got him in the last two plays of the game just to get him some snaps at Arizona where his late father had played,” Taylor says. “So Joe signals a run alert, kind of a one-step quick throw outside on a run play in our four-minute [offense], and gets him his first career catch. It was a really special moment. He did that for Kwamie Lassiter. This week he goes and gets Yoshi’s first touchdown and goes and retrieves that ball.

“It just speaks to the way that these guys will do anything for the guy because he’s thoughtful. He does things for his teammates. Pretty cool.”

On Sunday, a number of those teammates would show, again, that to be the truth with their play, in how they gutted out a fourth quarter through which Burrow and the offense hit their bumps. It was Trey Hendrickson. It was Sam Hubbard. It was B.J. Hill. It was all of them.

It was, overall, a pretty full expression of how capable the Bengals are now of pulling Burrow out of the fire when need be. Which, of course, he’d always do for them.

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Week 6 gave us plenty to sort through. So here’s what we’re getting to this morning …

• C.J. Stroud and the red-hot Texans find themselves in mid-October as the top contender to the Jaguars’ perch atop the AFC South.

• How PJ Walker never doubted another shot would come for him—and how he prepared to lead Cleveland to a massive upset on short notice.

• Our Week 6 takeaways, which dives deep into how the Jets’ and Browns’ defenses allowed for the 1972 Dolphins to pop the cork on another year without a perfect team.

But we’re starting with the Bengals closing the book on the first chapter of their 2023 season, with what they hope is much bigger things ahead of them.

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Taylor has the Bengals at 3-3 heading into their bye week.  :: Joseph Maiorana/USA TODAY Sports

A Sunday like this one is the kind the Bengals may look back on in mid-February, if black-and-orange confetti is falling in Las Vegas, as a defining one for their 2023 team.

That’s because a couple of weeks ago things didn’t look so good. Burrow had a setback in practice. The team had failed to capitalize on the momentum of a Monday night win in its Super Bowl LVI rematch with the Rams, held to just three points for the second time in four games with a listless offensive performance in Tennessee. The Bengals were 1–3, with a cross-country trip next, then a game against a fast-improving 2022 playoff team.

So while making it to the Week 7 bye at 3–3 isn’t how anyone drew it up in July or August, given how they got here, and what they went through to get here, the Bengals will most certainly take it. Which is why, as Taylor settled in about an hour after Sunday’s win over Seattle to take in his son’s flag football game, relief was probably the overriding emotion he felt—like he, and his Bengals, could finally come up for air, and reset.

“Yeah, it’s good to take a deep breath right now,” he says. “It was a long training camp for the reasons you mentioned. We put ourselves in a 1–3 hole to start the year. To get to 3–3, get a chance to get healthy, hit the bye, take a deep breath and get ready for this next stretch, this comes at the right time for us.”

Even better, the light at the end of the tunnel is a lot brighter than it was coming out of Tennessee and Week 4. And the biggest reason why, of course, is the health of Burrow, who has taken a turn in the right direction the past two weeks.

The quarterback told his coaches how much better he was feeling a few days after the 27–3 loss to the Titans, and how he figured he’d feel more comfortable scrambling to throw, running to pick up first downs and executing the Bengals’ keeper game—which has generated a lot of field-stretching big plays the past couple of years—against the Cardinals.

True to his word, Burrow’s first touchdown pass against Arizona came in the low red zone—after he sidestepped one pass rusher—and with another right in his face. His second came after he reset, climbed the pocket and went way downfield to Ja’Marr Chase for the score. His third was, again, in the low red zone, with a quick trigger as Arizona’s Victor Dimukeje was coming hard at him. Add in a daring scramble for a first down in the third quarter through the teeth of the Arizona defense, and it looked to the staff like, well, the old Joe.

“It’s hard to say in practice because you’re not scrambling a bunch, and we’re not trying to put him in those positions as you’re getting him through it,” Taylor says. “In the Arizona game, even a sack that we had in the low red zone, he’s hopping over people and running around. You can kind of see right there, O.K., this guy’s feeling pretty good right now. That was kind of the first instance. It was in the first half last week against Arizona, where he seemed to have confidence in [his calf] to be able to move around.”

Then, last week, the best signs might’ve come with Burrow’s silence.

Of course, the Bengals felt like how he came out of the Arizona game, with some of the hits he took, would be important. But he wasn’t bringing the calf up much to his coaches or really discussing it at all without being prompted. Which might’ve been the best sign that he was closing in on full-go participation in practice and was no worse from the wear of a physical Sunday.

“He felt like that to me,” Taylor says. “We didn’t talk about it much this week. I thought he had a great week of practice. I thought he moved well today. That’s kind of where we’re at with it.”

And for two quarters, the Burrow-led Bengals offense carried the performance against Arizona right over to the Paycor Stadium field for the game against the Seahawks.

Cincinnati’s first drive of the game looked like 2021 or ’22, with Burrow methodically moving the sticks and picking Seattle apart. He was 9-of-11 for 58 yards, and capped the 13-play, 69-yard drive with an easy eight-yard touchdown throw on a slant to Tyler Boyd. Along the way, the Bengals converted a third-and-6, and Burrow drew the Seahawks offside to convert a fourth-and-2 with a hard count.

The Bengals’ second possession was similarly surgical, sparked by a 31-yard back-shoulder throw to Chase (on a free play after Burrow got the Seahawks to jump again), and finished with the throw to Iosivas on which Burrow had great protection, and bought time for the rookie to uncover and give the team a 14–7 lead.

“He moved on that one,” Taylor says. “It was great protection—great protection. He moved to his left, but I think he’d be the first one to tell you there was no one near him. Yoshi was able to get wide open. The emphasis there would be outstanding protection from the offensive line, the tight ends.”

So at the half, the Bengals had every right to feel like Burrow was back. He’d gone 18-of-22 for 143 yards, two scores and a 124.1 rating. He was, at that point, 54-of-68 for 460 yards, five scores, a pick and a 113.2 rating over a six-quarter stretch.

But that was where the significance of gutting out a win Sunday really came into focus for the Bengals, with the Seahawks plenty capable of punching back.

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Hendrickson and Hubbard each had a sack to close the door on the Seahawks late in the game :: Kareem Elgazzar/The Enquirer / USA TODAY NETWORK

Two years ago, when most people still didn’t know what to make of a Cincinnati team that was reeling off wins behind a quarterback coming off an ACL tear, Burrow told me, repeatedly, that the old sky-is-always-falling Bengals were dead and gone. And he’d be proved right in coming within an Aaron Donald play or two of winning a Super Bowl.

At this point, the culture Burrow and the Bengals knew was taking hold is fully formed.

Which, of course, is about a lot more than a pinball offense capable of lighting up a scoreboard such as a Christmas tree. It is, as the Bengals see it, about the way everyone is pulling in the same direction, and that’s where things like you see Burrow do for guys down the roster, such as Iosivas or Lassiter, add up—and where one side of the ball picks up the other when that’s what’s needed.

And the offense wound up needing it Sunday, with Seattle picking Burrow off on the Bengals’ first second-half possession, then sacking him twice on the team’s next possession to help get the visitors into the fourth quarter down 14–13. So, as the afternoon wore on, it became increasingly clear it’d be on the defense to find a way to get this one home.

“You know what the attitude really is?” Taylor says. “It’s not, Oh man, the offense isn’t scoring. It’s, We want this on our shoulders. That’s what you feel from those guys. They want that pressure. They want that opportunity. They want to be able to rise up to the challenge. There’s no finger-pointing when something isn’t going our way for one unit. It’s the other unit gladly being able to pick up the slack and put the game on its shoulders.”

Which is where the defense, behind Hendrickson, Hubbard, Hill and D.J. Reader up front, Logan Wilson and Germaine Pratt behind them, and a ball-hawking secondary took over, with a little help from their wizard of a defensive coordinator, Lou Anarumo.

An outstretched interception from veteran Mike Hilton short-circuited one Seattle surge into the red zone in the third quarter. Another pick from Cam Taylor-Britt set up a 52-yard field goal from Evan McPherson early in the fourth quarter. After that, the team’s aggressive, menacing defensive front took over.

With 3:27 left, and Cincinnati leading 17–13, Seattle had a first-and-goal from the Bengals’ 7, but Hendrickson ran down Geno Smith for a 12-yard sack. And right after, Anarumo and the defensive coaches saw that the Seahawks were starting to overset to Hendrickson’s side.

So they countered by changing their rush strategy opposite Hendrickson. The adjustment three plays later, on fourth-and-goal from the 6, generated a one-on-one for Hubbard on Seattle backup right tackle Jake Curhan, a matchup that ended, predictably and quickly, in a drive-ending sack. After the Seahawks drove the field again, getting in the shadow of the end zone, it put Hill one-on-one with Anthony Bradford on fourth-and-8 from the Bengals’ 9. Hill was able to beat Bradford off the snap, forcing a rushed-Smith throw that he was able to bat down.

That one ended the game, and capped the sort of finishing kick he knew his veteran front would have if things got tense. The Seahawks came close, over and over again, but the Bengals were able to close them out.

“You just feel it,” Taylor says. “You just feel the attitude. It’s not an, Oh man, we have to go out there again. It’s the opposite. It’s like, Great. This is on us. We get to go make a stop and win this game. Ultimately, that’s what they did.”

Taylor then added, “They’re just relentless. They’re relentless. They rise up and they know the game’s on their shoulders. … Those guys take a lot of pride in winning a game for us.”

And in doing so, they set up some even cooler stuff ahead.

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An interception from Hilton short-circuited one Seattle surge into the red zone in the third quarter :: Kareem Elgazzar/The Enquirer / USA TODAY NETWORK

This, of course, isn’t two years ago.

The Bengals don’t have to prove how good they are to anyone anymore.

So as Taylor kicked off the bye week with the serenity of watching a youth game, he could take that deep breath knowing—not guessing—that his team is heading the right way now, with a healthier Burrow, an offense that’s coming together and a defense that’s capable of winning games.

Taking an optimist’s view, you could look at the Bengals’ start to 2023 with a very real silver lining, in that the team had to win with a hobbled Burrow, and thus had to pull on more levers to keep itself in the playoff picture, even new levers that, you’d hope, would be there to be pulled again as the season wore on. But as Taylor sees it, in processing the first six games, and what scratching and clawing to 3–3 had done for his team, there was more revealed than built through that stretch. In so many ways, it just confirmed what he knew.

“That’s been every year for us,” he says. “I really do think that we’ve learned from the wins and the losses equally. I’m not going to sit here and say we’ve learned more from those three losses. We learn from the wins, too. This team does a good job of understanding what type of game it’s becoming as the game goes and whether that’s drawing on past experiences from this season or years past. It’s something that the team is able to do.

“I think that’s why we’ve been able to have success late in the year like we have.”

And the trust Taylor has in it happening again is reflected in the break he’ll give the guys this week. They’ll be at work today, then off to recover and rejuvenate for the 11 games (plus playoffs, they hope) left on the slate.

When they get back in, it stands to reason Burrow will be closer to 100%, and the offense he runs, as a result, will be too, which would be tough news for the rest of the AFC. The Bengals will need to be there, too, with the Niners and Bills up next on the schedule, and set to give Cincinnati a real test on where the team is at as everyone approaches midseason.

For now, though, all of them can take that deep breath, and look back at what they’ve made it through to set up all those big games from here on out. And know that they’ve got a team that’s getting to be as capable of lifting up its quarterback, just as the quarterback has been carrying it through all the biggest moments of the past few years.

Which, now more than ever, is something even a rookie like Iosivas can really appreciate.