Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver Tyler Boyd isn’t a fan of the “woulda-coulda-shoulda” chronicles, and he made that clear Thursday afternoon while discussing Sunday night’s playoff rematch against the Buffalo Bills.
The Divisional Round game was played in the snow from start to finish, with the Bengals winning 27-10 in arguably their most complete game of the season to reach the AFC Championship Game for the second year in a row.
“Back in the playoff game when we won in the snow, a couple of their players were saying if it wasn’t snowing that they would’ve beat us,” Boyd said. “We here now. So we gonna see what the outcome is.”
Bengals Eager To Prove Playoff Win Wasn’t a Snow Job
The quote Boyd was referencing came from former Bills wide receiver Isaiah McKenzie, who said it on Tyler Dunne’s “Go Long” podcast two months after signing with the Indianapolis Colts.
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“If we were in a dome, it would have been a totally different game,” McKenzie told Dunne. “I’ll tell you this: That snow had a lot to do with it. Let’s be real. Our run game wasn’t the best run game. We didn’t have a run game, so the snow was a big deal because we pass the ball.”
Bengals running back Joe Mixon rushed for 105 yards in the game, but quarterback Joe Burrow also played well, completing 23 of 36 for 242 yards and touchdown passes to Ja’Marr Chase and Hayden Hurst, with another one to Chase overturned on a controversial replay review.
“The Bengals ran basic routes,” said McKenzie, who had two catches for 10 yards in the game. “Maybe we should’ve done that — ran basic routes, like out routes, go balls — instead of running routes that you have to be going lateral or coming back to the football or turning and running curls and things like that.”
Chase, who said that was his first-ever snow game, was aware of McKenzie’s comments as well.
“Yeah, I remember that,” Chase said. “It’s something crazy to say. That don’t fire me up. That’s a day-old opinion. We still won at the end of the day.”
Some coaches may not want their players bringing that back up, but Zac Taylor had admitted he has people mining every corner of the internet looking for things that will fire up his team, so it wouldn’t be surprising if the reminder of McKenzie’s quote came in a team meeting this week.
“I think there’s maybe teams I’ve been on in my lifetime where you’d shy away from things like that, worried it might damage the psyche going into a game,” Taylor said. “Not this team. We’ve just got the right competitors and right leaders on our team that respond well to that kind of stuff, and I always count on them to do so.”
It wasn’t that long ago that the Bills and Bengals and their fan bases had the most connected relationship among opposing teams in the league. It started with Andy Dalton’s 49-yard touchdown pass to Boyd in the closing seconds of the 2017 finale to eliminate the Ravens and vault the Bills into the playoffs, ending that franchise’s 18-year postseason drought.
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The Bills fans flooded the Andy and Jordan Dalton Foundation with more than $400,000 in donations. Then, the Daltons repaid the favor by donating to the pediatric department of the Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo.
The connection grew even stronger on Jan. 2, following the Damar Hamlin incident.
It’s not as though it has devolved into bad blood after one former player’s comment. But the Bengals thrive on that kind of talk, as Tyreek Hill and Justin Reid found out at different points last season.
The quote and the source aside, Boyd said he’s ready to put on a show in the rematch.
“I feel great about it. We’re starting to become us again,” he said. “Our identity is starting to arrive. This is a big game because this is two teams that are championship-contending teams. It’s definitely gonna be a dogfight. But I think we’re most prepared.
“The bigger stage, the better we are.”
Sunday’s snow-free forecast calls for a high of 64 degrees Sunday with a game-time temperature near 50.
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