Zac Taylor Assigns Responsibility For Late-Game Execution During 2024 Season

Cincinnati is on the outside looking in on the playoff race.

Cincinnati Bengals head coach Zac Taylor walks pff the field after the NFL game at M&T Banks Stadium in Baltimore on Thursday, Nov. 7, 2024. / Albert Cesare/The Enquirer / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

CINCINNATI — Zac Taylor and his staff are searching for ways to finish games the right way in closing out victories. The Bengals have rarely done it this season and haven't done it enough in his six-year tenure.

Not even Joe Burrow's MVP-level play can rise above late-game problems that Taylor takes responsibility for.

"It all falls on us," Taylor said on Tuesday. "We're trying to put our players in the best position possible, and always have to provide them solutions, and sometimes solutions are hard to come by. We've all watched the same games. We've seen how they've ended. They've all ended a little bit differently, and so we got to continue to find ways as coaches to make sure our players have the confidence they're put in the best spot so that they can make those plays and help us finish those games. So we're all part of it. I do think it absolutely turns to me and trying to find ways to continue to put us in the best positions possible, find ways to put us in the best position possible."

Taylor is still confident in a process that's left him with a 46-53-1 record in Cincinnati (21st among active NFL coaches).

"I think we've got a really good process that obviously has put us in a position in a lot of these games to be in a spot to win them," Taylor noted. "We just haven't won them. And there's not always this easy solution that's just going to hit us right in the face on how this thing's going to change, but I 100% think I gotta uncover every stone and as coaches, we gotta make sure our process is perfect to win some of the games that in the past, we've won. We've won some close games before, and some of these close games, and it's disappointing for everybody right now.

"I still have a lot of confidence in how we go about things and what we have in front of us going forward. And sometimes it just takes winning one of these games to go Okay, there we go. That monkey's off our back a little bit, and now let's go continue and finish. And so, sometimes there's just kind of a snowball effect. Unfortunately, the snowball has gone the wrong way for us this year. There's no excuse for that, but we got to find solutions to find a way to finish it."

The coaching brain trust gets some time to decompress and energize for the stretch run over this bye week.

And then it's right back into the fire against the AFC North-leading Steelers.

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