Locked On Bengals - Daily Podcast On The Cincinnati Bengals - What needs fixed on Cincinnati Bengals defense? A deep dive into the defense's 2024 regression

Starting point is 00:00:00 The Cincinnati Bengals defense has obviously been a big part of the team's issues this season. We dive into the details to try to find root causes and a path forward after disappointing start to the season for Luanna Ramos unit. You are Locked on Bengals, your daily Cincinnati Bengals podcast. Part of the Locked on Podcast Network, your team every day. What up, Bengals fans, and welcome to another episode of the Locked on Bengals podcast. I'm your host, Jake Liskgo, join today. by Mike Santagana at Bengals underscore Sands on Twitter. You can find his writing at Bengals TalkS.I.

Starting point is 00:00:41 You can find his podcast. It's always game day in Cincinnati, wherever you get your podcast. And of course, thanks for making Lockdown Bengals. Part of your everyday routine for the everydayers. Thanks for making us your first listen for those of you out there who have made us part of your routine. We appreciate the regular patronage of the Lockdown Bengals podcast. If you're new to the show and you're looking for a place to stay out to date on all things, Bengals, you're in the right place.

Starting point is 00:01:06 You can subscribe on YouTube or wherever you get your podcast so you don't miss an episode. And Mike, we just spent about 35 minutes talking about the Cincinnati Bengals offense and where it has flaws. And that unit at least has actually performed for the Cincinnati Bengals this year. On the other side, it's fair to say that the offense hasn't finished some games when they've been in position to get some game-winning plays at times. but the defense has been in its entirety pretty close to an unmitigated disaster. Not quite like totally unmitigated disaster,

Starting point is 00:01:40 but pretty much everyone who covers this team has taken a shot at playing the blame game for the one score games, for whatever issue they want to talk about. I think it's fair to say that the defense is the biggest issue with the team right now. If you had to pick a side of the ball, we recently talked about it on lockdown Bengals last week. We talked about the trenches as the biggest issue overall, if you could kind of combine both sides of the ball. But between the two sides,

Starting point is 00:02:07 there are more issues on the defensive side of the ball. We started with the offense from a very big picture perspective of things. Is there something different with Louana Rumo's approach to playing defense this year in your estimation? What has changed the most that has potentially led from being a pretty good defense, they have a lot of confidence in Annamo's ability to be a game plan coordinator, at least, to what we've seen from that unit this year. I think there's more single high, and I think you're doing that because you want to stop

Starting point is 00:02:40 the run and you don't, you know, you have to be gapped out when you don't have a guy that can take two gaps. And to me, that led to four, I think it was four explosive plays, including two touchdowns for the charges. And not saying single high is just bad, but when they know you're going to be in that, they just ran four verticals and just whatever seemed the safety doesn't open up to, they threw it because they weren't matching it either. They were just spot drop into their zones and letting the thing is when you do that,

Starting point is 00:03:10 some quarterbacks, it's okay because you have a chance to break on the ball. You don't really with Herbert, like that's one thing you can definitely give him credit for is extremely talented arm. And he's just able to fire that thing in there. You could blame Cam Taylor Red and Gino Stone or whoever. And when you do that, you know, let's think a little bit. When you're blaming G.Bist's over that, maybe this works with a Jesse Bates back there. Maybe because he's so rangy, because he's so smart, they'd be able to break up some of those passes up the scene.

Starting point is 00:03:41 It also doesn't help that you're week 11 and you're still having miscommunications and missed assignments and thinking of the Cam Taylor Britt play where he's matching his receiver and nobody else matches. They're all pointing to pass things off and it ends up in a free touchdown for Quentin Johnson. My biggest thing is just this, when I thought of the 2021 and 2022 Bengals, especially in the playoffs, they were assignment sound. They were, you know, fundamental, I feel like good tackling when it mattered. I can think of the Tyree Kill play in the 2021 AFC championship game and the games against Derek Henry where the corners got involved in the run fits. I think those are like negatives now. Is that something with Anirumo? I don't know.

Starting point is 00:04:26 But that is to me, there's two big reasons, big picture-wise, this defense isn't working. You lost both your force multipliers and Jesse Bates and DJ Reader. And you're also just not a fundamentally sound defense anymore, which they were. I think that was something you could point to in 2021, 2022. There's a few things there. Let's start on the DJ Reader, Jesse Bates, conversation. Then we'll get to why a defense suddenly becomes less sound about. its assignments. Last year we chalked that up to safety changes, and we'll dive into that a little bit more

Starting point is 00:05:01 in a couple of minutes here. But Jesse Bates and DJ Reader are two players that I think a lot of Bengals fans that listen to this podcast, at least some, are sick of hearing about. But there's a reason that we keep bringing them up. And when you're talking about they're playing more single high. And the reason they're playing more single high is because they need to fit the run with bodies because they don't have DJ Reader who can two gap anymore or occupy multiple. individuals at a very high level and free up linebackers to make place in the run game. But when they had DJ Reader, they still had issues on defense last year with explosive plays. Well, then that goes to the inability to backfill for a very good safety in Jesse Bates,

Starting point is 00:05:43 who continues to play at an extremely high level after his departure from Cincinnati, because as any observer of film could see, the guy is just a talented player with good athletic ability, great instincts and is a versatile piece at the back end of a defense to play either half field or single high coverages and do those at a high level. And so you've got this conflux of factors here, Mike, that I'm seeing come together. It's this perfect storm where now you can't put two safeties back because you don't have the guy that lets you be more light box, more conservative in preventing those explosive plays, keeping safeties back deep. from a resource perspective because you have a guy that's that good that wants you do that in the departure of DJ Reader. Okay, that's one thing. And then you answer that by going single high because you feel like you have to.

Starting point is 00:06:37 And that has gotten them decent results against the run, barring game winning explosive runs from opposing teams the last few weeks, which obviously are bad. But then when you go to the single high thing to deal with the run game, you don't have the player in the back end who can cover up the way the DJ reader could cover up for you at front. So you've lost these two key players that traditionally thought to be unimportant positions, safety and nose tackle. And it's led to this cataclysm of issues where you have nobody to take care of the back end, nobody to take care of the front end, and you just are out-resourced as a defense, even if you're in the right calls at certain times. And I don't think they're in the right calls. Sometimes they're not the level they need to be or they're not executing them, whether it's miscommunication or assignment soundness,

Starting point is 00:07:28 as we just talked about some of the examples from that Chargers game. There's a reason that we're talking a lot, I guess, about Jesse Bates and DJ Reader, even though we're two years away from Jesse Bates being a Bengal and just in the first year of DJ Reader's departure. Yeah, it's the cascading effect of these players and how they're able to multiply what the defense does and change the numbers. It's always why it was weird that I feel like there was always, always he whenever you'd say, I think Jesse Bates is the most important player on this defense. And it might be DJ Reader at two before you get to Trey Anderson. Trey Anderson, he's the biggest personal impact.

Starting point is 00:08:06 He makes the most plays. He has the biggest effect personally. But he doesn't change the defense, you know? And this year, he's by far the most important player. And the only time his defense is good when he gets sex. But you could play differently schematically with the other two, where especially when they were together. And that's why to me in 2021, 2021, 2022, this defense was pretty good, pretty awesome, is it didn't matter who was out there because you had a guy that could give you

Starting point is 00:08:36 a force multiplication in front and a force multiplication in the back end. You don't have that in the back end anymore. I don't think you have it in the front end, even though Trey is an amazing pass rusher. It's just when they were at their prime, you could go single high or too high. You could have safeties out of the fit or in the fit. It doesn't matter. You could play to the offense. I think that's the biggest part is that now I don't know if you can because you pretty much always have to be gapped out or you're going to get smashed in the run game. And when you do get gapped out, that's when quarterbacks throw it over your head. And it doesn't help that individual performances from guys are faulty. But I think the way lose defense works, because of the way they play, they play React attack up front where they're going to try deconstruct blocks rather than fly off the ball and just create havoc.

Starting point is 00:09:21 Now on the back end, they do a whole bunch of different stuff back there. They switch stuff. They try to play all these different coverages. You can't get to the roller decks of coverages, and you can't get to the roll of decks of fronts without guys that can make you play effectively in those fronts and coverages. And that's where you get to the issue, where that's the root cause of the issue. That's why we're still talking about it. Jesse Bates allowed them to play single high because he played one and a half safety's jobs when he played the deep safety. DJ Reader allows you to.

Starting point is 00:09:51 to play too high, even against good run games, because he played the job of one and a half defensive tackles up front. And they don't have anybody that does that now. Let's continue the conversation with some more root cause analysis, some more discussion around development, coaching scheme. What's gone wrong this year? What they should be doing next? We'll continue the conversation and deep dive on the defense coming up next. Today's show is brought to by Hillsdale College. History, economics, the great works of literature, the meaning of the U.S. Constitution, did you study these things in school? Probably not. Or even if you did, maybe it's time for a refresher. Time and technology have changed a lot of things,

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Starting point is 00:12:17 Mike, there are some issues that we haven't really dug into too much that I want to touch on as well. One of them is just pass rush effectiveness in general. And I don't know how much Lou Anna Rumo can do to help with this. But there's the pass rushing conversation, there's the conversation around playmaking, and there's a conversation around assignment soundness that we alluded to earlier that I still want to come back to.

Starting point is 00:12:47 So I'm going to try to keep remembering that. Hopefully I remember that. And we come back to that. But where I wanted to go next is actually to talk about the pass rush because he started to talk about this with Trey Hendrickson. And I was looking at the Bengals pressure numbers. Trey Hendrickson leads a team, as you would expect, with 55 pressures this year. PFF has him at 12 sacks. He obviously leads the NFL in sacks, 12 hits, 31 hurries.

Starting point is 00:13:08 He's got three batted passes this year. B.J. Hill is second on the team in pressures. He's got four batted passes. That's right there with Trey Henderson. Good job for B.J. Hill getting his hands into those passing lanes is a interior pass rusher when he can't get a. home to the quarterback. And you wouldn't expect him to have as many pressures to Trey Hendricks, and he's a defensive tackle.

Starting point is 00:13:26 He's not a top tier pass rusher. He's a good player. The second best defensive lineman this year, he has 18 pressures. He has fewer pass rushes than Trey, about 100 fewer. 325 versus 230. It's 55 to 18. Next best. Joseph Osai has 183 pass rushing snaps this year to Trey Hendrickson's 325, so about

Starting point is 00:13:51 140 less is 15 pressures. Sam Hubbard has 224 pass rush snaps. He also has 15 pressures, despite 40 more snaps than Joseph O'SI. Miles Murphy has just 105 pass rushing snaps this year, which is almost 80 less than Joseph O'Sai, more than 100 less than Sam Hubbard. He has 12 pressures. Their next leaders in pressures are Logan Wilson and Jermaine Pratt at 12 and 7. They're getting the idea here. You go from 55 to 18. And it's not like there's a bunch of guys with 18. And even if it was, I don't think that would be good. Is there anything they can do to improve the pressure situation?

Starting point is 00:14:33 Yes, there is. It's getting Sam Hubbard off the field, right? Like, is there anything else? That's the obvious one to me. It's just the Chargers in this past game blocked him with a full back, not to hold him up for a guard to get there, not as a chip. solo blocked him with a fullback four times. And that fullback won every single rep, including panaking him on one of those.

Starting point is 00:15:01 If you are a defensive end and you're about to get a fullback blocking you one-on-one in pass protection, your eyes should light up like you see $500 sitting on the ground in front of people. That's what I think of. Maybe they think of $5 million because they're paid a little bit more than me. It's just like a ton of money. He said, oh, my goodness, money. I got a good, I get, I get a free sack. I get a free pressure.

Starting point is 00:15:25 No, he lost all four reps, zero percent pressure rate again this week. It's unbelievable that he's still getting out there because he wasn't good in the run game either. And I know that's not what this was about, but like that's what Sam Hubbard is supposed to be about. He was terrible in the run game in this past game. So what is he providing you that you're giving him the most snaps on defense as your second, sorry, not the most snaps on you, but your most snaps between. the three person edge rotation that they're using with those three. That is the one thing.

Starting point is 00:15:55 Two, maybe you could get to some more pressure stuff, but you've got to get to obvious passing downs, too, to be able to get to your pressure situations. And then you can't always just send pressure, so you have to be able to drop out of it, too. I think it's something that, like, the old bangles were able to do because, you know, they stopped the run pretty well with DJ Reader in 2022, 2021, then they could get to these fun pressure looks.

Starting point is 00:16:15 But you have to be in third long for that, because no coach wants you to be, maybe Zimmer, but no coach really wants to be double-mugged up on first and ten. Because despite having bodies there, that is pretty easy for an offense, to design a run game that should work on paper. I think there's the biggest part to me is develop. Develop Miles Murphy. That is your one shot, especially for the next few years,

Starting point is 00:16:44 because I don't think Sam Harbour is going to be better next year. Joseph Osai is most likely gone. Cam Sample is coming off a major injury. Now, maybe you bring a guy in or draft somebody, but can you develop the guy you took in the first round who's really just, I think of it as either you can think of it as like a big giant sculpture that, you know, this whole defensive staff gets to sculpt into whatever they want

Starting point is 00:17:05 because the only thing really missing physically is a little bit of the bend. And it's not terrible. It's just not great. He's 270 pounds. He bends like you would expect. He doesn't bend like Miles Garrett. But like the get-off is extremely impressive. and he's just a puppy out there when it comes to pass rush moves.

Starting point is 00:17:22 He's trying to throw some stuff out there, but they take snaps away from him. And now he doesn't get to try it on the field. And that's where you're going to really learn. Coaches aren't in the business of always developing players. The great ones are, but the good ones aren't. They are in the business of getting the best product they can out there. And that goes down to the position coaches too. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:17:42 They're trying to get the best product out there. They're not always in the business of developing these guys. We will get to development as well. So we have three topics left to get to. We have playmaking ability. We have assignment sound. Assignment soundness. We have development.

Starting point is 00:17:59 And these are all issues, I think, facing the Cincinnati Bengals defense this year, outside of just the handful of players that are still playing at a high level. And it's really just a handful of players. It's Trey Hendrickson. It's Logan Wilson. It's Mike Hilton. And there have been ups and downs for each of those guys this year, despite overall still playing at a pretty consistent level.

Starting point is 00:18:18 I'd say BJ Hill too. He's playing pretty solid football this year. You can also throw Key Davis Gather into the mix when he gets onto the field, which is rare, just 160 stats for him. But when he's been on the field, he's done some nice things. It'll be interesting to see if he gets a bigger job. But let's get to this playmaking concept next, because this is a little bit nebulous to talk about.

Starting point is 00:18:41 But they have six different players with one interception this year, Cam Taylor, Britino Stone, and Sam Hubbard, Akim Davis-Gaither, Jermaine Pratt, and Von Bell, have one interception each. They've forced six fumbles, Logan Wilson, two, Jermaine Pratt, too, Sam Hubbard, and Trey Hendrickson, one each, according to PFF. Is there a lack of playmaking ability when you think about this defense, Mike? Yeah, I mean, at least a little bit, for the amount of times that they go for strip balls,

Starting point is 00:19:07 they don't, you know, six is all right. I don't know where that ranks in the NFL, but they give up a lot of yards. after contact because they're trying to strip the ball and doesn't always work that way. They don't always get the ball. They got a big one, but that also came from a shin that didn't come from them trying to strip the ball this past week.

Starting point is 00:19:26 Yeah. But yeah, I think there's a playmaking issue. And the weird thing is that Logan Wilson, early in his career, was like a ball magnet. He was always picking the ball off, forcing fumbles, recovering fumbles, whatever. I don't know what happened there, whether that is an effect of a worse past rush

Starting point is 00:19:41 and worse safety play behind him, so he just doesn't feel confident and his ability to play, his ability to know what to do on a given play. Like, I can take a half second here because I know DJ is going to protect me in the run game. Or I can come up a little bit because I know I've got good safety play and good corner play behind me to be able to help me out. They don't play 11 guys as one mind, really. It feels like they kind of have to not do that because they don't get the individual performances. They also just don't have the guys for it.

Starting point is 00:20:10 Yeah. And I think there are defenses that have guys, like, I think that Chargers defense, it's better on paper. But there's also guys that are like no names that are playing really well. Maybe they are good players. And we're just finding out just now at Jesse Minter unlocked them. But we think of like Darien Henley and you think of a fourth round corner in Cam Hart and all these guys that like played really well in the game this past week.

Starting point is 00:20:33 I don't think that's impossible to think that's something that Bengals could do. But yeah, playmakers in general, I don't think they have a ton of it. I think Pratt has turned into like the one guy's able to sometimes force fumbles. but he's also missing tackles and giving him a lot of yards after contact because he's forcing those fumbles. Got that delicate balance where tackling has been an issue for this team this year. And like you said, it's hard to figure out how much of that is, you know, directly tied to coaching versus are they just not developing? Are they picking the wrong players?

Starting point is 00:21:05 What's going on with the assignment soundness? We will finish the show with those questions coming up next. Today's show is also brought to you by Fandall. Tackle all of the NFL action in week 12, week 13, because well, Thanksgiving is almost here with America's number one sports book. Right now you can bet $5 and get $150 in bonus bets if you win. That's right. You've heard us talk about Fandul for a long time here on Locked on Bengals, but maybe you haven't signed up. Well, new customers can bet $5 and get $150 in bonus bets if you win.

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Starting point is 00:22:02 Assignment soundness is a topic to be alluded to at the very beginning of this show, Mike, and we haven't gotten back to. Let's get back to it now. what changes outside of Jesse Bates' departure, obviously, maybe he was just keeping all the ducks in a row. Maybe he was just that guy. But what else in your mind could lead to this sort of assignment, responsibility breakdown that we've seen over the last two years

Starting point is 00:22:24 with the personnel changes that we've seen happening? Because, like, Lou's got his guys now. They're not the free agents. Like, they hit on a bunch of free agents, but they invested a lot of big draft capital into defensive players, and this is a result. and a lot of that is to do with busted assignments. What in your mind leads to that sort of thing?

Starting point is 00:22:45 I mean, the traditional answer is they're not coached well. That's traditionally what you think of when you see a team that gives up big plays by missed assignments, not individual playing. Can you specify it? So when we say they're not coached well, is it like a teaching thing or like what are you thinking of when you say that they're not coached well? And like they don't understand their assignments. Like what specifically is not happening in your mind? I think the best defense is just see the game through one eye or two eyes. If you want to think of that like a person, like they all see it as one person.

Starting point is 00:23:19 And when you're missing assignments, you're blowing assignments. You're miscommunicating. You're obviously not doing that. You're not seeing the game the same way as the guy next to you. So I would say that is you're not being taught the game to the same degree as the guy next to you. You don't think the same thing as the guy next to you. When you watch a team like I've been watching the Lions defense, they think as one mind when they make a move like that that you don't see blown assignments

Starting point is 00:23:42 left and right because it seems like when they point to pass a guy off, the other guy already knows. And I think of this too when it comes to like offensive line play. So always think about offensive line play stunts. When you have the same mind as the guy next to you, you pass stunts great. When you're working individually, you don't. So that's what I think of when I think of like that's a traditionally a sign of bad coaching. Now, I also think when you're green. dot and the guy next to who has been in the defense for years are dropping to the same spot in a zone, you start getting at a point of like, well, these guys know their assignments. These guys have worked together their whole careers.

Starting point is 00:24:21 So that becomes like a, is there an individual play aspect of that too? Probably. But traditionally, I think of when you see a defense that just looks out of sorts more often than not, it's a sign that the coach isn't getting his message across. Yeah, and there could be multiple reasons for that. one interesting theory around this is at some point, do you just need a change for the sake of a change? Because they've all seen Luana Rumo and they've all been the subject of his ire at some point or have made a mistake at some point or something like that. Do you just need a different voice to help unify things?

Starting point is 00:24:58 I wonder, is it an issue with player evaluation? Did they just overestimate some of these guys' ability to understand what the defense is trying to? to accomplish in the mental capacity and maybe there's just not an understanding there. Maybe it's just a teaching, like you said. Maybe these coaches just aren't doing a good enough job of teaching the way they want their defense to be seeing things the same way. And it's not just in pass coverage either. It's not just Cam Taylor Britt trying to match where DJ Turner is passing off across

Starting point is 00:25:26 or on the opposite side of the field. It's not just the instance you referred to where Jermaine Pratt and Logan Wilson spot dropped to the same spot on the football field. It's not guys defending grass necessarily. It's also you see touchdown runs where you end up with two defensive linemen in the same gap. Actually, happen in the Chargers game. The big run that ended it, Von Bell, Logan, Melson, same gap. It felt like a touchdown run from the goal line also was the same issue earlier in that game, to my eye.

Starting point is 00:25:55 That could be because the guy's getting washed out and he's just losing that badly and it's one-on-one or two-on-one or whatever. But it also leads, it's the thing where you end up where you, where you're, you hear people talking about, oh, it looks like that lineback was freelancing. It looked like they were pressing. Like you heard this with Vantos Perfect a lot, for example, guys just trying to go off script outside of the structure of the defense to make play. Sometimes it works, but often it leads to major gaps or coverage busts or miscommunications or whatever you want to call it in big plays for the offense.

Starting point is 00:26:28 So there's a potential issue with just teaching, right, with just understanding the defense. and understanding their role in the defense, understanding what's happening around each individual player in the defense. There's also this issue where this I don't think about Lou as much, but I think about an evaluation perspective in it, in a draft and developed perspective, the Bengals coaches are obviously very involved in their drafting process and their free agency process.

Starting point is 00:26:55 They're directly, obviously, involved with player development, which, as you mentioned, isn't always the highest priority for NFL coaches. But it does seem like there's a development, problem. And I don't know why we're getting to this at the very end of the show. This is probably a pretty pressing topic, but there are so many, like I said, so many draft picks invested in players on this defense and they have not seen the return or those guys can't get onto the field, which is equally head scratching. What have you seen from a development perspective with some of the young players on this team that have been drafted over the last few years? I've seen nothing.

Starting point is 00:27:31 I mean, very little. Think of the last three years, and who's a player that got drafted here and got better in those three years? And the answer, the best answer is Dax Hill, who sat on the bench and then played a different position. Yeah, that's what I was thinking, too, was Dax Hill is the easiest answer. I would argue potentially DJ Turner looked like he was taking strides this year. It looked like he was better than his rookie year. Those are the two, though. Camp Taylor Britt looked like he was taking that trajectory.

Starting point is 00:27:59 Big step back this year. We haven't seen the development from Miles Murphy. We haven't seen the development from Joseph Osai, who again, we started to see it. And then things went way off the rails. We haven't seen it from the defensive line in the drafts. Zach Carter no longer with the team. That wasn't a great pick when it happened, but we haven't seen that development. So like, where is it?

Starting point is 00:28:15 Jordan Battle we haven't seen take major strides this year from last year. So yeah, to your point, like where is it? How does that happen? So your assistant coaches, I think, do more of your development than your defensive coordinator. And we just pointed to the three guys who looked a little bit better throughout that, we're all corners. So I would tell you, I think the cornerback coach is probably doing a pretty good job. And then everybody else has. Maybe the linebackers coach, like Logan Wilson and Jermain Pratt have been reasonable.

Starting point is 00:28:43 Yeah, but they were at their best of the old guy and he's gone. Betcher, I think it was a name. But yeah, the Marion Hobby very well respected. And I think, you know, I think I thought of him as a very good coach. And I don't think there's like an on-field type of like he's got guys doing crazy stuff. But in terms of you've given him a lot of talent, and it hasn't done him. He hasn't done anything with it.

Starting point is 00:29:08 You talk about Osai. You talk about Murphy. You talk about Carter. You talk about what we've seen so far with Jenkins and Jackson. I don't think you can really make an assumption on hobby based off of that. But we have three top 100 picks. I guess was Osai in the top 100? Around there, though.

Starting point is 00:29:27 It felt like a top 100 talent. 69. He was picked. Definitely a top 100. It's just been a while. Three top 100 picks. Three top 100 picks and none of them are starters. And then one position group.

Starting point is 00:29:39 And that just goes for all the positions. I mean, the safeties coach since he left, you had Daxil and Jordan Battle, and either one got better. Jordan Battle started hot. And Daxil had to switch positions to get on the field. I think getting on the field is a big issue too, because that's where a lot of your development happens. And this is, I think, the big issue with Anurumo is he has favorites,

Starting point is 00:29:55 and it doesn't feel like their jobs are ever under pressure. You ask about Miles Murphy snaps. He just talks about Joseph O'Sai. He doesn't talk about Sam Hubbard. You ask about during battle, and he finally starts teetering on, you know, rotating him in Von Bell. And if you asked about either one of those linebackers versus Akeem Davis Ghafer, your answer would be no. Akeem Davis Gaea can come on the field in three linebacker packages. So there's, and Cam Taylor Britt took 11 weeks to try to see if somebody else can do something as he's one of the worst corners in the league this season.

Starting point is 00:30:25 I think that's the biggest issue with Aniromo, to be honest, is just you've got favorites and you're not playing. guys that you drafted that are important to this team who are going to give you better results most likely and you won't play them. Yeah, it is one of several frustrating issues. James Betcher, by the way, still with the Cincinnati Bengals in his third year. Al Golden. Al Golden was the old one, right? Golden, Golden previously was with the Bengals, yeah. And I think Duffner has a role with the linebackers as well. He does a lot for the defense, but I associate Duffner with linebackers for some reason. Anyway, a lot of, list of issues facing this defense from development, from player evaluation in the first place

Starting point is 00:31:06 where maybe some of these guys just weren't going to pan out regardless of the coaches. It's not all on development. Like maybe some of these guys should have taken steps with the coaching they've been provided and just haven't. I think there's a cultural aspect here as well where some of these young guys aren't getting on the field. Well, maybe they're not taking care of their business in the right way as well. And that's part of your culture that we haven't really talked about much this year,

Starting point is 00:31:28 but I do think that the culture around the team is hard to quantify has pretty tangibly diminished with some of the departures they've had, some of the issues around T. Higgins, Jamar Chase, Jesse Bates, contracts, DJ Reader departure, Joe Mixen departure, even like some of the leaders and big voices in the locker room, in addition to the way that the organization is interfacing with these players from a contract perspective. And that can lead to players showing up in different ways,

Starting point is 00:31:50 especially with young players. And we've talked about this with Jermaine Burton. Perhaps it's also happening on the defensive side of the ball where there's some psychological stuff going on, some way they're showing up to work, cultural stuff going on there that could be contributing as well. That's all highly speculative. I don't know anything there. But when we're looking for answers as to why these things aren't working,

Starting point is 00:32:09 it's not just one guy. There's a lot of blame to go around. There's a lot of factors there. I'm just pointing out some others there that might be part of it. The Bengals are back to work this week. We will shift our attention back toward the Cincinnati Bengals' upcoming opponent, which I believe is the Pittsburgh Steelers, which I definitely should know and do know it is, in fact,

Starting point is 00:32:29 the Pittsburgh Steelers on December 1st in Cincinnati, the Bengals return home. We will begin to keep our attention there as the Bengals return after their by week. Until then, thanks for listening to this episode of the Lockdown Bengals podcast, Ho day and have a good one.

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