Cincinnati Bengals defensive coordinator Lou Anarumo wants his team focused on the little things, even if it is something the team should have already nailed down before the season started.
Where else can a team go after giving up nearly 600 total yards in a 41-17 loss?
Before anything else, Bengals coaches — and even fans — could see that their guys were routinely out of position or misplaying normal occurrences.
Anarumo touched on this with Geoff Hobson of Bengals.com: “Well, if we just pin the hip, it’s a (tackle for loss). Instead it goes for 30-something yards, which is ridiculous. It’s just the fundamentals of the things that we all did right a week ago, but we did none of that this week…I mean that goes back to April.”
For Anarumo, another big issue was edge play:
“It just gets back to holding the edge and keeping contain. A couple times like the players already mentioned, we were in position to do that and we didn’t. That is a Day 1 thing. We can’t chase ghosts. You go chase plays you are going to give up more than you make. That’s kind of what we did. We got a little bit overaggressive at times and lost the edge of the defense.”
The performance was so jarring because it was a callback to last year’s defense that got a coordinator fired and was on pace to be histrionically bad. It wasn’t the same unit that took the field in Week 1 and almost upset the Seattle Seahawks on the road.
Banging the “back to basics” drum is something the Bengals did often last year. For a new coach like Anarumo, the hope has to be this was the only ugly wake-up call the team will receive this year.
If it isn’t, lessons learned in April might be a theme into October and beyond, which is the worst-case scenario.
