Eleven resentful men return the Bengals to a familiar place

Cincinnati smothers Buffalo, makes another AFC Championship date

The last time we heard so much about Lou Anarumo, he was being accused of mistreating the Cincinnati Bengals. Since the NFL had been doing the same thing for decades, the charges were dropped.

In 2020, Joe Burrow’s first season, defensive coordinator Anarumo had a dispute with veteran linebacker Carlos Dunlap, who claimed he learned he was being demote when he saw a whiteboard in a coach’s office. Unnamed players said Anarumo routinely called the players “dumb m——f——rs” and “bitches,” and that second-year coach Zac Taylor was either too weak or negligent to fix it.

Stories like that usually launch like a moonbound rocket if there’s any foundation. This one, apparently, lacked liftoff. In 2021 Anarumo returned, and so did quarterback Joe Burrow, from knee injuries. The Bengals went 10-7, knocked off Kansas City in the AFC Championship and lost the Super Bowl to the Rams late in the fourth quarter.

Now Anarumo is the Hot Coordinator. The Colts are expected to interview him for their head coaching job. The Giants, Anarumo’s boyhood team, interviewed him last year. The fact that CBS’ Tony Romo basically likened him to a defensive Galileo for three hours on Sunday didn’t hurt.

The Bengals squelched Buffalo, 27-10, in a steady snowstorm on the Bills’ home turf, and nailed down another visit to Kansas City for another AFC title. The 56-year-old from Staten Island, who was Purdue’s defensive backfield coach for eight prime years of his career, is an official Wise Man.

In truth, the only genius in American society is the person who invented the Uncrustable, but the Bengals have never been known for passing the course Anamuro is teaching. Buffalo ranked fourth in points, first in third down conversions and second in yards per rush in the regular season. On Sunday Buffalo was held to 3.3 yards per rush, sccored one touchdown and went 4 for 12 on third down, and was down 14-0 before it took its fifth offensive snap.

Somehow the Bengals took everything away. Josh Allen ran eight times for 26 yards. Receivers Stefon Diggs and Gabriel David had six catches, total. Buffalo’s longest run was eight yards. The Bengals had only one sack, but that’s not their thing necessarily. They hit Allen eight times and broke up eight passes. And the Bills possessed the ball for only 26:06.

Diggs, like many other receivers, convinced himself he’d been ignored and conducted an unsightly tantrum in front of a seated Allen, as the game expired. In truth Diggs was targeted 10 times, most of any Buffalo receiver. He just didn’t beat Cincinnati’s defenders that often.

Afterward, linebacker Matt Milano cited the Bills’ lack of energy and verve, and maybe you can understand. For nearly a month they’ve been trying to play football while worrying about Damar Hamlin, who suffered cardiac arrest on the field in Cincinnati Jan. 2. Hamlin has been visiting the team facility and was in a stadium suite Sunday. Maybe their water table of emotion was too deep to locate. But there are some structural problems that Cincinnati exposed with its physical dominion. Instead of counting on Allen’s knack for seizing games, Buffalo needs a tough runner on the order of Cincinnatis Joe Mixon. It also couldn’t find another consistent pass rusher when Von Miller fell.

Defensive backfield coaches, especially if they actually were DBs, see football the way catchers see baseball. Nick Saban played the position. So did Pete Carroll, Mike Tomlin, Don Shula and Kirby Smart. Anamuro was a quarterback at Susan Wagner High on Staten Island, the fifth and fiercest borough of New York, but his coaching orientation was on the other side.

Connections got him here. Anamuro coached with Joe Philbin at Harvard, and Philbin became the Dolphins’ coach and added him to the staff, where he found himself in meetings with former Nebraska quarterback Zac Taylor. When the Bengals hired Taylor away from the Rams to be the head coach, Anamuro came along to run the defense.

His tag as an ogre came and went. The Bengals were having yet another tough season, Taylor’s second. But Burrow remained healthy throughout 2021 and the Bengals ran through the league. In doing so they beat the Chiefs twice, and in those games Patrick Mahomes was forced to stop, think and stop again.

The first win, last January, wasn’t a defensive showcase.. Cincinnati won, 34-31. But it held Mahomes to 259 yards passing, and, more important, muffled Travis Kelce (five catches, 25 yards) and Tyreek Hill (six catches, 40 yards).

In the AFC championship, Kansas City strutted to a 21-3 lead after 25 minutes. It would score only three points thereafter. In that second half/overtime of Cincinnati’s 24-21 win, Mahomes was 8-for-18 for 55 yards, and Hill didn’t make a catch, and Vonn Bell’s interception enabled the winning field goal.

In this season’s 27-24 win, the Bengals held Mahomes to 16 completions, one touchdown and 223 yards, and Kelce had only four catches for 46 yards.

Anarumo is supervising an F Troop of undervalued defenders, who enjoy playing on their resentments. Those were only fueled by the assumption that Kansas City would play Buffalo in Atlanta, a neutral site because of the scheduling inequities that arose from the cancellation of the Jan. 2 Cincinnati-Buffalo game. The Chiefs and Bills had a coin flip, but the Bengals wondered why they didn’t get the same consideration in the Divisional game.

Bills and Chiefs fans had already bought 50,000 tickets for that Atlanta date. “Better send those refunds,” chortled Burrow after Sunday’s win.

Burrow, of course, was the Heisman winner and the national championship QB for LSU in 2019 and was picked first in that draft. Receiver Ja’Marr Chase was picked fifth in the next draft. But the only first-rounder on defense is Eli Apple, and the Giants chose him in 2016, and Apple is not exactly the core of this unit. There are three second-round picks and four third-rounders, and three up-front powerhouses that came from elsewhere: Nose tackle D.J. Reader from Houston, defensive tackle B.J. Hill from the Giants, and pass rusher Trey Hendrickson from New Orleans.

Two converted safeties, pass rusher Sam Hubbard and linebacker Logan Wilson, have added speed and discernment. Wilson, in particular, is better than most people know. He punched the ball out of Tyler Huntley’s grasp and into Hubbard’s, for the 98-yard fumble recovery touchdown that got the Bengals past Baltimore in the Wil-Card round.

“He’s a three-down Mike,” Anamuro says of Wilson, referring to his middle linebacker status. “Those are hard to find.”

Wilson probably deserved Pro Bowl status, but the only Cincinnati defender to make it was Hendrickson, and that was due to sacks. Instead of compromising everything to chase quarterbacks, Anamuro teaches two different types of Cover-2 alignments, and generally tries to overpopulate the middle of the field. He also discourages his safeties from trying to read a quarterback’s eyes, because, at times, they lie by design. Instead, read the “downfield shoulder.” It tells the truth because it has to.

The final interception Sunday was turned in by Cameron Taylor-Britt, who replaced the injured Chidobe Awuzie at corner during the season, and that was appropriate. Taylor-Britt was a high school quarterback in Montgomery, Ala., was told a scholarship offer from Auburn was coming, and finally chose Nebraska when it became clear it wasn’t.

Taylor-Britt was last year’s second-round pick and is the only rookie starter on defense, but Bell, Apple and Reader are the oldest starters and they’ve only played seven seasons.

Last year’s playoff wins were Cincinnati’s first since 1990, when Sam Wyche coached a 41-14 wild-card victory over the Houston Oilers. Last year also interrupted a five-year streak of losing seasons.

Anamuro’s arrival in 2019 also took the revolving door off the coordinator’s office, which had housed four different men in three seasons. He might be packing up soon, for happier reasons. He also might leave the seething Bengals with a life lesson from his brief time in the barrel: Reputations are overrated.