A common refrain from Cincinnati Bengals players this week, including stars like Joe Burrow and Ja’Marr Chase, is that this year’s Super Bowl is “just another game.”
“Obviously it’s not like that, there are only two teams left and it’s for the ring, but I think the best way to do that is to try to treat it as another game,” Borough said after training on Friday, the last of the season. .
Their opponent, the Los Angeles Rams, played in the Super Bowl just three years ago, 13-3 loss to the New England Patriots. Meanwhile, the Bengals have not won a playoff game since the 1990 Wild Cards Tour. This year’s Cincinnati team is also the youngest Super Bowl roster ever, with an average age of 25.8 years, according to an analysis by the website. FiveThirtyEight.
But despite the Bengals’ relative youth, coach Zac Taylor noted the great stage experience many of his players had in college or on other NFL teams. Taylor, 38, is in only his third season as head coach but was the quarterback coach for the Rams in Super Bowl LIII.
He said he and Duke Tobin, the personnel manager, purposely built the team around players with post-season experience.
“They certainly haven’t drowned out these moments – they’ve proven it over the past couple of months,” Taylor said. “There are a lot of guys who played in tournaments in college, whether it was LSU or Clemson or Alabama or Ohio State. And then a lot of those agents that we signed with, they were part of playoff teams before. So these guys know that they belong. to this stage.”
Nine Bengals players, including Borough and Chase, won a national championship in college. Trey Hendrickson and Mike Daniels were among the free agent deals who had watershed experience with their previous teams, the New Orleans Saints and Green Bay Packers.
