8/11/25: The Afternoon Training Camp Report

There are lingering questions in the aftermath of the first preseason game. 

Tony and Mo have Bengals training camp reports weekday mornings at 7:25 on 700WLW, and weekday afternoons at 3:45, 4:45, and 5:45 on ESPN1530.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Tony, You and I didn't have much of a chance
on Friday to talk about the Bengals preseason game, and
so I hate to do this because they did do
so many things well. Joe Burrow did a lot of
things really really well. But unfortunately, I think for a
lot of us, our first impression from the game last
week was how the defensive effort and performance looked familiar.

(00:21):
I wanted to see more. I didn't see it.

Speaker 2 (00:25):
Yeah, look, it was a tough situation regardless when you
play your starters and the other team doesn't, because right
away it's a lose lose situation. Right. The offense dominated,
but a lot of the conversation was man and the
offense look great, but they did what they were supposed
to do against two and threes. If the defense would
have held its own against Philadelphia and their twos and threes,
we would have said, great step forward. They did what

(00:48):
they needed to do against a bad group or a
lesser group. Now let's see when the competition rises. Unfortunately,
we're talking about a group of the Philadelphia Eagles second
and third team guys that I thought were more physical,
that I thought got to the ball quicker that I
thought were staying on blocks longer. I expected to see

(01:09):
a defense flying around, playing free, playing confident, and I
saw the total opposite. It seemed like a defense that
was a step slow. It seemed like a defense that
was hesitant, and a defense that flat out got punched
in the mouth by another team, second and third team guys,
which is unacceptable.

Speaker 1 (01:26):
It totally is. And I think the other thing that
is troubling for me. You know, during that game, Geno
Stone left with a soft tissue injury, and so you know,
maybe he's weak to weak and he's going to be
fine for the first game. It goes on to have
a great year. But when you spend months on end
talking about lack of safety depth and then you hear
the head coach during the weekend acknowledge, you know what,

(01:46):
we've got to make sure we're deep enough back there,
that's frustrating to me. It's frustrating to me that we're
still talking about safety and the depth at that position
when these are things we talked about six seven months ago.

Speaker 2 (02:00):
Yeah, is there anything worse than the words soft tissue
injuries as well? Because those just always seems to be
the ones that linger on. But that's the thing. This
wasn't a oh boy, what's going to be the plan?
There doesn't seem to be much depth. We're all shocked
by this. It was man, this is kind of what
we outlined that this could be an issue if if
someone goes down, there's just not building depth in the

(02:22):
safety room. There's not a lot of starts in that
safety room, and at the back end of your defense,
you need a little bit of a veteran presence to
kind of calm things down as they get a little
crazy on the field. This is every bit of the
nightmare scenario that we talked about with this Bengals team
of what happens if we talked about that with the
old line, We talked about that on the D line,
and we've talked about it at safety. I'm sure they're

(02:45):
going to give some guys some opportunities this week, but
what happens if those guys aren't the answer? Where does
this team turn next? At a position that's going to
be very vital in year one of our Golden's defense