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INGLEWOOD, Calif. — It took a half, but the Rams defensive line eventually took over the game and beat up the Bengals line and quarterback Joe Burrow.
Burrow was sacked only once in the first half but six times in the second half, tying the Super Bowl record for most times sacked in a game.
“It’s a good front,” Bengals coach Zach Taylor said. “It’s arguably the best front in all of football. We’re not the first team that they pressured. I know people will probably make it that way, but they’ve got tremendous players that stepped up and made some big plays and made it difficult on us.”
Aaron Donald and Von Miller both finished the game with two sacks each and smothered Burrow down the stretch. The final play of the game was Donald pressuring Burrow into an incomplete pass on fourth-and-1.
“Every tape we’ve watched they hit every single quarterback on almost every single snap,” Taylor said. “It’s a challenge. I thought our guys did a tremendous job managing that. As the game gets on, they did a good job creating that pressure. So, when we had some negative plays on first-and-10, running the ball on second-and-13 is going to be pretty tough. Being more efficient in the second half on first-and-10 would have helped us.”
Taylor did not seem to help his line out with play calls to slow the pass rush down. Instead of calling some screens and draws to take advantage of the aggressive pass rush, Taylor kept Burrow in straight dropbacks and the Rams got to him.
“There’s probably going to be things we look back on and we’ll have to analyze exactly what we could have done differently,” Taylor said.
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It was not a surprise that the Bengals offensive line struggled. That has been a theme of the playoffs. The Titans sacked Burrow nine times in the divisional round. It looked like the Bengals might win the battle early but the Rams kept coming.
“I thought in the first half of this game the protection was tremendous. In the second half, we called some passes and it got difficult,” Taylor said. “We’ll have to see how they all played out. Everyone is just going to say it was the offensive line. We’ve got to see exactly how that played out. We don’t ever want our quarterback to get hit but that’s life in the NFL sometimes.”
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