{"id":691464,"date":"2026-05-24T12:22:13","date_gmt":"2026-05-24T12:22:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/691464\/"},"modified":"2026-05-24T12:22:13","modified_gmt":"2026-05-24T12:22:13","slug":"more-2026-season-predictions-have-the-bengals-returning-to-the-nfl-playoffs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/691464\/","title":{"rendered":"More 2026 season predictions have the Bengals returning to the NFL Playoffs"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fans of the Cincinnati Bengals<\/a> have a reason to feel pretty positive going into next season. The team put plenty of their offseason capital into acquiring defensive players to help the team now.<\/p>\n

That is huge for a team that has all of its starters returning on offense with the best quarterback and wide receiver trio. Joe Burrow<\/a>, Ja\u2019Marr Chase, and Tee Higgins<\/a> are set to play with each other for quite some time, but they are in their primes now as well.<\/p>\n

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That equation has Tom Blair and Ali Bhanpuri from NFL.com<\/a> excited about their prospects for next season. They both have Cincinnati going 11-6 and returning to the playoffs as a Wild Card team in a close race with the Baltimore Ravens<\/a> for the AFC North title.<\/p>\n

Here are Blair\u2019s thoughts on the Bengals:<\/p>\n

For three straight seasons now, the Bengals have followed a similar path to ruination, with injuries and counterproductive defense working together to hold Joe Burrow back. It wouldn\u2019t be unreasonable to cap them at around eight wins again, knowing that the additions of Dexter Lawrence, Boye Mafe, Jonathan Allen and rookie Cashius Howell to the defensive front aren\u2019t all guaranteed to hit. But, man, Burrow is turning 30 this December, and the last time he was in the playoffs, he was 26. Let\u2019s get him into the postseason via a couple of mildly surprising victories, including over the Jags in Week 4 and against the Ravens on New Year\u2019s Eve.<\/p>\n

It has become a common theme following the NFL Draft that more analysts are coming around to what the Bengals have done in totality this offseason. The trade for Lawrence and sending the No. 10 overall pick over for him straight up caught some criticism initially. However, with some time to sit with it, analysts are coming back with more predictions like this.<\/p>\n

Truly, if you watched even a few games last season, you knew the Bengals\u2019 defense was just terrible. The height of it was allowing the Chicago Bears<\/a> offense, which came off a week of struggling, and a New York Jets<\/a> team starting Justin Fields<\/a> at quarterback, to look like they were the top offenses in the league, dropping both games in embarrassing fashion. The Bengals scored 42 and 38 points, respectively, in those games, with Joe Flacco<\/a> only being on their team for just a few weeks.<\/p>\n

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There were games in which the offense definitely let the team down, but that result was far more common over the last two seasons.<\/p>\n

Now, with a group that has actually been upgraded with veteran players and not just given a new coordinator, we might see some decent results.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Fans of the Cincinnati Bengals have a reason to feel pretty positive going into next season. The team…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":691465,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[559],"tags":[64,63,631,1248,1252,55397,629,1270,5368,1235,593,85,627,337431],"class_list":["post-691464","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nfl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-baltimore-ravens","tag-chicago-bears","tag-cincinnati-bengals","tag-dexter-lawrence","tag-joe-burrow","tag-joe-flacco","tag-justin-fields","tag-new-york-jets","tag-nfl","tag-sports","tag-tee-higgins","tag-tom-blair"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/691464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=691464"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/691464\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/691465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=691464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=691464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=691464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}