Follow-up · Jaguars 22, Bengals 17
We went against Vegas and our own model. Four for four.
We took Jacksonville when the sportsbooks and our own projection both had Cincinnati. The Jaguars won 22-17 and all four calls hit, one of them with nothing to spare.
Against Vegas
Vegas favorsCIN -2.5
Our pickJacksonville beats Cincinnati.
Opened CIN -2.5 TueNow CIN -2.5 Sun
Jaguars 22, Bengals 17
Grading the preview: Everyone's picking the Bengals. Big mistake.
The calls, graded
- HitJacksonville beats Cincinnati.Jacksonville won 22-17. Cincinnati was the 2.5-point favourite.
- HitJacksonville sacks Joe Burrow at least twice.Jacksonville sacked Burrow exactly twice, for 14 yards: one by Arik Armstead, one by Danny Striggow.
- HitCincinnati scores 20 points or fewer.Cincinnati scored 17, despite 428 passing yards from Burrow.
- HitJacksonville runs for at least 100 yards.Jacksonville ran for 111 yards on 27 carries. Cincinnati ran for 23.
The result
Jacksonville won 22-17 in Cincinnati. It came down to the last snap. On fourth-and-10 with 50 seconds left, Burrow hit Chase Brown in the flat and safety Rayuan Lane III stopped him 1 yard short at the 12.
It was Trevor Lawrence's first win over the Bengals in four tries. He went 18 of 23 for 227 yards and a touchdown, and threw no interceptions. “You’re going to have to win games like this throughout the season where you maybe don’t play your best and it’s not pretty, but find a way,” he said.
The closest call: the sacks
We said Jacksonville would sack Burrow at least twice. It sacked him exactly twice, once by Arik Armstead and once by Danny Striggow, for 14 yards. That is a hit with nothing to spare. One fewer and it's a miss.
The pressure mattered more than the count. Burrow said his red-zone interception came under it: “I got pressured and was trying to get rid of it and didn't see (the defender),” he said.
Hit: Cincinnati held to 17
Burrow threw for 428 yards, 39 of 54. That was his eighth 400-yard game. Cincinnati still scored only 17. Two interceptions did it: Jourdan Lewis returned one 45 yards to set up a touchdown, and Foyesade Oluokun took the other in the red zone.
There's an asterisk here, and we'll print it. Cincinnati lost Ja'Marr Chase to a concussion in the second quarter, and Tee Higgins left with a groin injury in the fourth after 11 catches for 151 yards. We didn't call either injury. The Bengals finished with 437 yards. This was a defence that bent and didn't break, not a shutdown.
Hit: 100 on the ground
Jacksonville ran for 111 yards on 27 carries. The run that mattered was Chris Rodriguez's 25-yard touchdown off left guard with 6:25 left, which made it 22-10.
The other side of it: Cincinnati ran 15 times for 23 yards. The game was Burrow or nothing, which is the game Jacksonville wanted.
Where our model was right, and we were too
The preview said our projection and the sportsbooks were both reading Burrow's arm and missing the scoreboard. The arm was real: 428 yards. Our call held because those yards turned into 17 points, not because Burrow was stopped.
This was one game, decided by one yard on the last play. One sweep doesn't show that going against the line works. It goes on the record next to the misses, and the record grows one game at a time.
