It doesn’t take much to fire up Peyton Manning during the Monday Night Football ManningCast, but the Cincinnati Bengals threw everything they had, literally, at pissing him off with a bonehead trick play for the ages.
The Bengals came into Monday night with Jake Browning at quarterback while Joe Burrow deals with his injuries. Naturally, we’d all expect them to gameplan around having such a young and inexperienced signal-caller at the helm. However, Cincinnati wasn’t at its best when they called for some trickeration late in the game deep in their own territory.
With the score tied 21-21 and a little over five minutes left in the third quarter, the Bengals had the ball at their own 25-yard line. Browning took the snap and threw a screen to wide receiver Tyler Boyd. It became clear immediately that Boyd intended to pass the ball back across the field, but the Jaguars defense hurried him. In that hurry, he failed to notice Jacksonville linebacker Josh Allen, who easily intercepted the ball and made it down to the eight-yard line before being tackled.
Watching live, Peyton was incredulous. He was so incensed by the over-thought play that he had to get up and walk it off, all while complaining about why Cincinnati isn’t just letting Browning get into a rhythm.
https://twitter.com/awfulannouncing/status/1731876176992604396
“What are we doing?” Manning exclaimed. “Why…why are they not letting Browning throw? My mic just fell off.
“Browning hasn’t thrown an incompletion and we have two receivers throwing passes.”
Indeed, Browning has actually been having a really strong night running the Bengals offense, with 300 passing yards and two touchdowns as of the time of this writing. While Peyton is prone to protecting quarterbacks, he’s got a pretty good case here that the Bengals are overthinking things.
For Peyton’s sake, we hope the Bengals leave their other trick plays in the bag for the rest of the evening.
