Bengals 2025 Season in Review

76 percent. Best in football. The Bengals turned red-zone trips into touchdowns at the highest rate in the entire league — and still finished six and 11. Here's how Joe Burrow's mid-season injury rerouted the year, and the one number on defense that explains everything that went wrong. Six and 11. Missed the playoffs. Fourth in the AFC non-playoff pecking order. For a team built around Burrow and Ja'Marr Chase, this was the year Cincinnati got muffed by the side of the ball they couldn't fix.

The team-level split is wild. The offense finished at −8.9 total expected points added — league average, nineteenth. Fine. The defense? +134.4 expected points added allowed — and on defense you want that number deeply negative, so +1 34 is a five-alarm fire. 20-ninth in the league. Thirteenth percentile. The offense itself was boom-or-bust in the truest sense — 45 on the Dolphins, 37 on the Cardinals, 42 in a shootout loss to the Bears, but also three points in Denver, 10 in Minnesota, and a zero-point home shutout against Baltimore in Week 15. The one steady thing all year was third down: 45.4 percent, fifth in the league, 80-eighth percentile. They moved the chains. They just couldn't stop anybody.

Now let's talk about the passing offense. Cincinnati threw it 680 times for −18.2 total passing expected points added — 20-fourth in the league, 20-eighth percentile. 249 yards a game through the air, 36 passing touchdowns, but 24 offensive turnovers — and that's the story. This was a two-quarterback season that played out exactly the way you'd fear, and after Week 10 the math collapsed. Same Ja'Marr Chase throughout — 125 catches, 1412 yards, 32 percent target share, a true number-one. The Week 14 loss in Buffalo is the snapshot: Burrow throws a short right to Chase at the Bills 33, Cincinnati up three in the fourth, Christian Benford jumps it, 63 yards the other way, touchdown. Game over. That one play swung expected points by more than 10. The passing offense wasn't muffed by talent. It was muffed by who was throwing it.

Now let's dig into the rushing offense — and the quiet bright spot of the year. +7 total rushing expected points added, seventh in the league, 80-first percentile. A top-10 run game by efficiency. But the volume number gets weird: 4.2 yards per carry, 20-ninth in the league, thirteenth percentile. 93 rushing yards a game. How do you square top-10 efficiency with bottom-five yards per carry? Chase Brown. 232 carries, 1019 yards, 4.4 a clip, six rushing touchdowns, and 78.3 rushing yards over expected — meaning he produced 78 yards more than an average back would have on the same carries against the same fronts. He carried the unit. Steady floor week to week, and a real reason Cincinnati was the best red-zone team in football.

Next up, the pass defense — where the season died. Cincinnati allowed +94.0 expected points added through the air, and remember, on defense you want that number deeply negative, so +94 is catastrophic. Thirteenth percentile. 33 passing touchdowns surrendered, 4175 passing yards, 245 a game. 35 sacks, 20-fifth in the league. The one thing that kept this unit from being historically bad: 21 takeaways, 13 interceptions and eight fumble recoveries, 60-sixth percentile — actually above league average. But the per-play number tells you the truth. +0.16 expected points added allowed every dropback. That's not a unit that takes the ball away enough to outrun the damage. They got muffed every Sunday.

And the run defense was somehow worse on a percentile basis. Cincinnati allowed +40.3 expected points added on the ground — thirteenth percentile, same as the pass defense. 2517 rushing yards allowed, 148 a game, 18 rushing touchdowns surrendered, 0.09 expected points added allowed per carry. Opponents ran on this defense and it worked every week. No game-by-game lift, no stretch where the front got right — a flat-line bad. The rule was three and a half yards a pop, the chains moving, another long touchdown drive on the scoreboard. Fix the front seven, and you have a playoff team. Don't, and you have another six and 11.