The Bengals walked out of Week 3 with a loss to the Steelers, but the postgame tone from the locker room was less about panic and more about the self-inflicted damage that cost them a shot at a 3-0 start.
For Cincinnati, the frustrating part was how many chances slipped away. Joe Burrow said the Bengals put themselves in a bad spot with mistakes that were hard to survive against a division opponent.
“Like last week with the penalties, we just can’t shoot ourselves in the foot like that,” Burrow said, via ESPN’s Ben Baby. “You can’t win in this league when you do that.
It’s really hard. It’s really hard.
We could have overcome it, but it’s hard to win like that.”
Zac Taylor pointed to the same theme, saying Cincinnati had enough opportunities in the fourth quarter to finish the job but couldn’t capitalize.
“We just didn’t close it out,” Taylor said. “That’s all there is to it.
We had opportunities in all three phases in the fourth quarter. We didn’t get it done.”
The Bengals had entered Week 3 after a 2-0 start, only to run into a roadblock against Pittsburgh. Star DT Dexter Lawrence, who had two sacks, said the loss should be viewed as a reminder that a perfect season was never the plan anyway.
“I think it’s a reminder to show y’all that we’re not going to go undefeated,” Lawrence said via SI.com’s Jay Morrison. “No year is gonna be perfect.
… Our goal wasn’t to go undefeated. So we’ll own this one.
We’ll come back next week and go out there and play.”
Lawrence said the Bengals made too many errors to finish the job, and he saw the game as one they let get away.
“We know we can’t allow that; however it comes, however they try to do it,” Lawrence added. “We made a lot of mistakes, and that’s what kept the game close and then ultimately helped them win.
“A lot of what was going on was self-inflicted. … You watched the game.
You know what happened. I don’t think it was anything special that they had going on.
We just didn’t do well on our end.”
On the Steelers side, Mike McCarthy said he had a specific scoring target in mind before kickoff. He wanted Pittsburgh to reach 31 points against Cincinnati, though he admitted afterward that putting that number out there was a mistake.
“ I wrote down 31 in my notes going in as far as the target. And that’s the last time I’m going to say something like that because I was stupid for that to come out of my mouth.
But I just knew that I felt that we needed to score points.” (Pryor)
Steelers quarterback Aaron Rodgers also praised running back Jaylen Warren’s ability to make defenders miss in space.
“Jaylen’s so slippery back there. First guy rarely brings him down.
He actually brings himself down more than the first guy.” (Pryor)
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