The Cincinnati Bengals’ offense as currently formulated is rooted in its passing game. With one of the brightest young stars at quarterback and arguably the top wide receiver trio in the league, that probably goes without saying, but Joe Burrow knows they’ll need more on the ground to counter how teams will play him and his receivers.
Particularly, they need more breakaway runs—even the modest ones, of which they had very few last season. According to ESPN, they had only 14 runs of 12 yards or more, tied for the fewest in the NFL during the 2022 season. Starting running back Joe Mixon had 11 of them, including four explosive plays of 20 yards or more.
“That’ll be critical for us this year”, Burrow told reporters during mandatory minicamp, via Ben Baby, about getting more runs out to the second and third level of the defense. “We all know teams plan to play us with how they played us last year and the end of the year before”.
The Bengals ranked fifth in the NFL last season in passing yardage with 4,240 yards, and second with 35 passing touchdowns. In contrast, they ranked 29th with only 1,528 rushing yards and averaged just 3.8 yards per attempt.
One of the game’s most explosive passing offenses should be complemented by a sufficiently dynamic running game, but that’s not what they often got a year ago. A lot of that was on a rebuilding offensive line that should be better this season.
The Bengals signed three linemen in free agency last year, with Ted Karras at center, Alex Cappa at right guard, and La’el Collins at right tackle. They added Pro Bowl left tackle Orlando Brown Jr. earlier this year, which will push Jonah Williams from the left side to the right side, with Cordell Volson at left guard entering year two and expected to take a nice jump.
Cincinnati’s running game was spotty all season, potentially under 60 yards one week and then over 160 the following week. In fact, they had seven games under 70 rushing yards and seven games over 100 rushing yards, including three games of 150-plus and one topping out at 241 yards on the ground.
Yet they went 6-1 when they rushed for under 70 yards, so it’s not necessarily a recipe for disaster. And they went 5-2 in the seven games in which they passed the century mark, though the sample sizes are too small and unnuanced to draw any kind of meaningful conclusions from that.
The bottom line is that they feel they need to have a more dynamic rushing offense that is more of a threat to breakout to the second and third levels in order to keep defenses honest. They want opposing teams to actually worry about Mixon going shoulder to shoulder with their defensive backs rather than just focusing on their big-bodied receivers like Ja’Marr Chase and Tee Higgins.
