But moving forward with Hogan in the starting role for now is the right call for Cleveland. Kizer is raw and needs to develop, and the pressure of starting for a team that’s won a single game during his head coach’s tenure isn’t the best environment for it.
But with Bill Lazor breathing life into this offense while the defense continues to play great, the Bengals now looks like the best team in the division, at least if we’re going off the last three weeks, during which the Bengals have shown their dominance.
Mariota was slow and stiff, clearly favoring his bad leg for most of the night. When he was sailing passes and taking hits early on, it looked like we were in for a repeat of last week’s Sam Bradford debacle. When he threw a pick-six in the third quarter that extended the Colts’ lead to 19-9, it would’ve been reasonable to write off the Titans at that point.
Minnesota’s coach, Mike Zimmer, canceled practice. NFL teams never cancel practice. The game never stops. In a way, it’s a repudiation of Next Man Up to send everyone home — an acknowledgment that some injuries transcend the transactional. Sometimes, even in such a brutal world, circumstances dictate that the next man can’t reasonably be expected to step up, at least not right away.
It happened at the beginning of practice, and obviously Coach made the right call to cancel, Vikings quarterbacks coach Scott Turner says. We weren’t going to get anything done that day.
He has been general manager for 11 seasons and will have made the playoffs in only four of them — two of which were in his first two seasons. This is a large sample size.
However, that might be the only positive from the future Hall of Famer’s move west.
