By the time Zac Taylor boarded for the short flight back to Cincinnati, the Bengals coach had cooled off a bit. The edge he carried in the immediacy of postgame, over the potential coin tosses and neutral sites catering to other teams but not his, and the way the group of players he’s proud of has been regarded, has dissipated a bit.
What hadn’t, though—and won’t—was the basis for all of it.
“I mean, we’ve got a team,” Taylor told me. “And it really doesn’t matter how people view us or what they think of us or if we’re underdogs. None of that. We know we belong in these games we’re playing in, and we’ve got confidence in each other, and that’s the only thing we care about right now.”
For obvious reasons, it was easy for anyone in the Bengals’ organization to ask, once and for all, The truth is, as Taylor said while the team loaded up to go back to Ohio, they didn’t really need to seek that validation from anyone else anymore. These Bengals know who, and what, they are. And if what happened Sunday doesn’t show you, well, then you may never know.
The Bengals’ methodical, systematic, 27–10 takedown of the Bills in Western New York was really just the latest example of what Cincinnati has become. It follows three straight wins over the mighty Chiefs. It follows consecutive AFC North titles. It follows last year’s trip to the Super Bowl.
If anything, these statements are only getting louder and more emphatic, and this one was plenty of both. At the half, the Bengals had doubled up the powerhouse Bills in yards (274–135), first downs (18–8) and, most importantly, points (17–7). Buffalo trailed by two or more possessions for every one of their second-half drives. And the Bengals did all this in the Bills’ house, and in the kind of inclement conditions that have made other visitors melt.
The night before the game, at the team hotel, Taylor mentioned to his players that Buffalo’s home playoff record was 13–1, best in the league. The idea was, as usual, to drive home the point because the bigger the challenge, the better his team would be—and that they, not the Bills, were going to be the toughest team to play in that stadium Sunday. Sure enough, when he brought it back up postgame, a player yelled at him from deep in the locker room: “Thirteen-and-two!”
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It was his team’s way of saying that there was a juggernaut at Highmark Stadium, and it wasn’t the Bills, whether or not anyone else wanted to recognize that.
“I think they just laugh at it now,” said Taylor, of his players’ feelings on the continued skepticism. “We just won the AFC championship last year, we’ve won 10 games in a row right now. We’re here. Whatever you want to make of it doesn’t matter to us.”
