Every organization is entitled to run the show its own way, within the rules and regulations laid out in the Collective Bargaining Agreement. There is a certain number of practices you’re allowed in every phase of the offseason, for example, and a certain number of things you can do in those practices that varies between phases.
Everything up to the three-day mandatory minicamp in the spring is voluntary. And apparently that’s voluntary for the coaches, as well. Teams are permitted to conduct 10 OTAs. The Cincinnati Bengals only conducted three under head coach Zac Taylor. As he explained, it’s all part of the plan.
“This is something we always preach to our guys is we’re going to do everything at a Super Bowl caliber, things that we believe will get us to the Super Bowl”, he said, via Geoff Hobson of the team’s website. “You may not see the results yet, but the process is what we believe in and then you saw that in year three and four and now five is what our expectation is”.
A former assistant coach under Sean McVay in Los Angeles, Taylor tried to bring over some of the things he learned under the supposed guru, who claimed his first Super Bowl title in 2021 over Taylor’s Bengals, but finished with a losing record in 2022. One of those things he learned is that you don’t need to beat your team up during the offseason.
“It is something that we think is tried and true”, he said. “We’ve been in it. It’s not something we just think will work, it’s something we know will work and our players understand the intent of everything that we’re asking them to do”.
The Pittsburgh Steelers under Mike Tomlin, of course, take a very different approach. Newcomers this offseason like Patrick Peterson have said that even the OTAs have a training camp-like intensity, and that their pre-practice meetings get them fired up to play in a regular-season game. And we haven’t even gotten to Latrobe yet.
Of course, the Bengals have been knocking on the door of the Super Bowl for the past two years and the Steelers have been upholding the standard from their couches in January and February. Not that a lighter offseason for Pittsburgh or a tougher once in Cincinnati would reverse fortunes.
“We have high expectations for ourselves”, Taylor said. “We know that there’s a lot that goes into that. It’s not just on paper. We have a really good roster and we’ve done really good things in the past. We all understand that’s not how it works”.
I’m not really sure how sacrificing practice time fits into that, but to be fair, the Bengals are not the only team that does that anymore. Even the New England Patriots’ Bill Belichick doesn’t utilize all of his OTA practice sessions. And frankly, with the amount of training that players do on their own these days, it kind of makes sense.
