Bengals head coach Zac Taylor at the 2026 NFL Scouting Combine in Indianapolis. (Press Pros Photos Provided)
Duke Tobin says this is really what it looks like when the Bengals are “all in” for the Super Bowl, but can the coaching staff make use of the players he brings in?
Indianapolis, Ind. — The most telling moment of Duke Tobin’s 15 minutes speaking to the media here at the NFL Scouting Combine was easy to identify.
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The giveaway was the bit of incredulousness in his voice as he began what by all indications was a serious and sincere answer.
“So the question is on whether we’re all in or not?” Cincinnati’s director of player personnel said Tuesday afternoon at the Indiana Convention Center. “I’ve been doing this a long time, and we’ve never not been all in. We are trying to get the best team possible with the resources we have. Last year we went all in. We signed over $400 million worth of contracts going all in. That’s what we do. We want to be all in. We’re trying to put the best roster together every year, and this year is no different.”
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I’ve attended a lot of press conferences, and repeating the question often is a tell someone thinks they just got a bad one.
Tobin tends to do that with most inquiries in this setting, though, presumably so everyone else has an idea to what he is responding.
And yet it just sort of made sense for both sides — Tobin and the reporters peppering him with questions — at this point in the offseason.
Are the Bengals “all in”? And is it fair to wonder?
Both questions are probably fair.
I would say Tobin genuinely believes what he says.
The Bengals do everything they can to put a winning team on the field every year — in his view.
But is his view correct?
Much like the Reds, I believe ownership truly wants to win. The trouble seems to be they just don’t know how.
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That is an easy conclusion to come to when looking at the results of both clubs over the last 30-plus years, but this is not about baseball.
This is a football column, one about a team that just went 6-11 and has missed the playoffs three years in a row.
Who is to blame for the team that has Joe Burrow at quarterback (sometimes) failing to maintain that run of success from 2021 and ’22 when they went to two AFC Championship Games and won one?
Well, the top two candidates spoke to the press Tuesday, and I tend to blame the second one more because Tobin had some skins on the wall before Zac Taylor arrived as head coach in 2019.
After Tobin, Taylor took his turn at the podium, as always happens at this event every year.
Taylor is 52-63-1 in seven seasons as the head coach of the Bengals.
Bengals director of player personnel Duke Tobin at the 2026 NFL Scouting Combine in Indianapolis.
They have those two playoff seasons but not much else to show for his time — unless you count bumbling his first season badly enough they got the right to draft Burrow out of LSU with the No. 1 overall pick in 2020.
I tend to think Taylor is more to blame for this mess because he arrived in town with such a thin resume then put together a staff similarly unimpressive on paper.
Since then, they haven’t done much to prove themselves other than ride Burrow, receivers Ja’Marr Chase and Tee Higgins and an opportunistic defense for those two deep playoff runs, the sort of fluky thing many franchises manage to do at least once over the years.
What about Tobin?
This is the start of the NFL Draft process, so his role is closer to the top of everyone’s mind.
Free agency comes first, though, and what they do in March probably will go farther to determine how many games they win this fall than what they do in April (during the draft).
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The bulk of the big names on the Super Bowl team were free agent signees or drafted before Taylor arrived.
The 2023-25 drafts designed to replace guys like D.J. Reader, Chido Awuzie, Vonn Bell, Mike Hilton, Jesse Bates and Sam Hubbard (the latter two both drafted before Taylor became coach) have mostly been a failure.
That leads a lot of people to point the finger at Tobin, and that is more than fair. Talent acquisition is his job.
What if he is drafting talent his coaching staff just can’t cultivate?
Seeds don’t grow without water and fertilizer. Plants often need a little TLC after they emerge from the ground. There’s an art to developing both fruit and football players, and not everyone gets it.
The curious thing is Tobin and his famously small scouting staff had some good (and bad) runs at drafting in his first 20 years on the job.
That includes A.J. Green, Andrew Whitworth, Kevin Zeitler, Carlos Dunlap, Domata Peko, Geno Atkins, Michael Johnson and more just off the 2015 team, which unlike Burrow’s boys was built the right way — from the line of scrimmage out.
Tobin seemed to supply Marvin Lewis with the goods to win four division titles from 2005-15.
Yes, I know he never won a playoff game, but Lewis had the extra task of divorcing the franchise from the lost decade of the 1990s.
They made the playoffs five seasons in a row with Andy Dalton at quarterback for goodness sakes, and they must have been drafting well because the team famously wasn’t that active in free agency prior to 2020.
The Bengals badly need a proven impact player at linebacker – like Ohio State’s Sonny Styles. But Styles will be gone long before the Bengals first pick in the draft.
The past 10 drafts have not gone so well, and some of that falls on the end of the Lewis era,
But during the Taylor era, it seems the draft hits are mostly guys who came pretty much ready to go — Burrow, Chase, Higgins, Chase Brown, Logan Wilson. Guys who proved themselves in college.
Amarius Mims and DJ Turner II appear to be exceptions — projects that are panning out — and a couple more we can say the jury is still out on.
Tobin said he still believes in defensive end Shemar Stewart, the first-round pick out of Texas A&M last year, because he was only healthy for one game last season.
Perhaps the light goes on for Stewart this fall, but for now he is like a lot of players the Bengals have taken lately — high on talent but low on production.
Jackson Carman and Jermaine Burton are in a league of their own when it comes to busts, but Dax Hill? Jordan Battle? Kris Jenkins? McKinnley Jackson?
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Hill could yet prove to be worth a first-round pick, but he’s never lived up to the hype going back to his days at Michigan.
If he weren’t a top 50 recruit coming out of high school, you might have never heard of him.
Jordan Battle (Alabama) is similar.
Third-round offensive guard Dylan Fairchild of Georgia may be a keeper, but around him they picked two linebackers — Demetrius Knight and Barrett Carter — who may be the worst tandem I have ever seen at that position. (Knight in particular seemed to be on the ground more than he was upright last season.)
So are the Bengals all in?
It’s a fair question as long as Taylor is the coach, and Tobin appears to be in danger of going down with that ship whether he actually knows what he is doing or not.
He hasn’t done himself any favors by supplying Taylor and his staff with guys who need more seasoning than most.
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