The Cincinnati Bengals didn’t just dabble in a new look during the preseason. They went all-in on the kind of offensive shift that actually means something.
Rotowire’s Ian Hartitz tracked every team’s preseason play-action usage against what those teams have done in the 2025 season, and Cincinnati stood out by a mile. The Bengals posted the biggest jump in the league, increasing their play-action rate by 17.7 percent.
The Tampa Bay Buccaneers, who open against Cincinnati in Week 1, were next at 12.2 percent. After that came the Los Angeles Chargers at 11.5, the Baltimore Ravens at 9.4, the Cleveland Browns at 8.4 and the New York Giants at 7.3.
That list comes with an important wrinkle: every team besides the Bengals has a new offensive coordinator this year, and the Ravens, Browns and Giants also brought in new head coaches. For Cincinnati, though, this doesn’t read like a staff reset. It looks like a real change in direction for head coach and play caller Zac Taylor.
The numbers back it up. In 2025, the Bengals dropped back 688 times and used play-action on 119 of those snaps, a rate of 17.3 percent. This preseason, that number jumped to 38 play-action calls on 109 dropbacks, or 34.9 percent.
Joe Burrow was part of it, too. He dropped back seven times in the preseason and used play-action on four of those plays, a 57 percent clip. Of his 13 preseason snaps, seven came under center, which works out to 53.8 percent.
Burrow spoke about the approach in June after the offseason program and minicamp.
“We’re trying to find ways to be explosive in the run game and then try to find some things off of that that can get us a couple of easy explosives,” Burrow said. “We’re committed to that.
Our coaching staff has done a great job this offseason of putting a plan together to try to execute that. So I’m excited to see how it works out.”
He also explained how the offense’s under-center identity has evolved during his career, with 2021 standing out as the exception.
“We were heavy under center in 2020, 2021, and that worked out well for us,” he said. “But then we were so explosive that we stopped getting the defenses that the under-center runs and the under-center play-actions were built for. And then (we) weren’t explosive in the run game when we faced those light box defenses.
“Then we transitioned to a gun team and our run game because of our RPOs and our quick game, basically. And the run game was kind of the icing on the cake because of that. And that was effective for a couple of years.”
It’s a tiny preseason sample, and nobody is pretending otherwise. But the Bengals kept showing the same thing even after Burrow left the game. That makes the trend worth watching.
When Week 1 arrives, Cincinnati’s under-center usage and play-action rate will be one of the most interesting details to follow.
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