I generally tend to lean towards the “McDermott’s defense is too conservative” side of the coin.
Surprisingly, the more I think about this match up, the more I hope they keep their defensive game plan relatively vanilla.
The Bengals offense is not a formidable rushing attack. They are bottom of the league in Y/G and Y/A. Over the past 3 weeks, they’ve been running the ball less. If we can stop their ground game with our base D, I’m all for forcing the dunk and dunk and playing coverage.
Burrows completion percentage during this same time span is 77%, and they aren’t exactly forcing the ball down field (8.2 YPC…#30th in the league)
It seems like Burrow is back to his old ways, and torched the 9ers defense when they went man to man. Luckily for us, I see a much more zone coverage heavy plan. That 9ers pass rush did not get it done. Will our front 4? I’m hopeful McDs alignments presnap, paired with the ability to stop the run, will force them out of their element that they’ve been in the past few weeks.
I do believe that McDermot will be comfortable forcing their offense to try to string together long, sustained drives. And I’m kind of okay with that.