Sports Writing, Jul 25 (EFE) .- The coach of the American Conference champions, the Cincinnati Bengals, Zac Taylor, stated this Monday that for the 2022 season his team lost the surprise factor that led them to Super Bowl LVI in February past.
“Now we know that we are not going to surprise anyone. This year I think our opponents are aware of the type of team we can be, but without a doubt we must redouble our efforts if we want to achieve it again”, said the “coach”.
The Bengals fell 23-20 in the 2021 NFL championship game in an upset campaign after just last in 2020 in the AFC North with four wins and 11 losses.
Going from a losing campaign to one with 10 wins and seven losses and then making their way to the Super Bowl in the playoffs required intense work, although at the time the Bengals coach acknowledged that they surprised some rivals.
“I don’t know how many we surprised because I can’t speak for other teams, but if there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that this year that won’t happen, this season we must show the team that we already saw we can be,” he explained.
The freshest memory of a team that lost a Super Bowl and returned the following year to lift the Lombardi trophy happened in the LIII edition, in which Tom Brady’s New England Patriots beat the Falcons; in Super Bowl LII they had fallen to the Eagles.
Zac Taylor is confident his squad can go down that path as long as they show more hunger than the one that brought them back to an NFL championship game 33 years later this year; They lost Super Bowl XXIII to the San Francisco 49ers in 1989.
“We have a lot of work to do to make sure we can meet our own expectations and raise our bar, and that’s not based on what you did the year before, forget that. There is a lot of demand to make sure we are ready.”
The key, the “coach” pointed out, will be to make the offense that is led by quarterback Joe Burrow work, something that will not be easy if you take into account that the Bengals have the third most difficult schedule in the NFL.
“The next step for our offense is to build leads early. We must add points from the beginning of the game. That is an area where we definitely need to improve, otherwise we are ready to attack this new year.”
The Cincinnati Bengals’ first game of the season will be against the Pittsburgh Steelers on September 9.
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Taylor says Bengals missed wow factor that got them to Super Bowl