Cincinnati Bengals 2026: The Coverage Report — 12 mock calls put Caleb Downs in Cincinnati, and the Bengals never picked in the first round

Cincinnati is one of 32 stops in this post-cutdown series. Everything below measures the outlets MissedTakes tracks — not all of football media. If a show or a beat writer isn't in our file, their Bengals opinions aren't in these numbers.

Coverage baseline: below the middle, not off the map

Across every team, our database holds 19,341 takes with a team subject, an average of 604 per club. The Cincinnati Bengals have 466 — 26th of 32 — of which 164 are graded, 25th of 32 against a league average of 212 graded takes per team. The Buffalo Bills top the board at 999 takes; the Atlanta Falcons sit last at 323.

So: light coverage, but not conspicuously so. Cincinnati is roughly a quarter below the league norm, in the same neighborhood as Jacksonville (472) and Pittsburgh (475), not the outlier the Falcons are.

What is unusual is the quality. Bengals takes grade out at 44.8 average accuracy and a skill delta of −6.29 — second-worst of all 32 teams, ahead of only Atlanta (−19.76). Skill delta measures a call against a naive baseline (see the methodology); negative means the field would have done better by assuming last year repeats. On Cincinnati, it did not.

The record explains most of it. Per the team profile, Cincinnati went 6-11 in 2025 with no playoff berth, after 9-8 seasons in 2024 and 2023. Their last playoff appearance in our file is 2022. Our tracked pundits kept pricing the Bengals like the 2021-22 team.

The roster cutdown: 43 calls, 2 grades

The news hook of this series is the 53-man cutdown, and here the honest answer is short. There are 43 roster-spot takes on Cincinnati in the file, and exactly two carry grades — both of them from 2025 claims, settled last month. The August 2026 cutdown batch is all ungraded: Nathan Jahnke's PFF projections on Charlie Jones ("he is listed as Cincinnati's top kick and punt returner and will likely make the roster because of his special teams value"), Tahj Brooks and Mitchell Tinsley ("that could leave Tinsley as the odd man out at wide receiver"); Bucky Brooks on Josh Johnson; Jay Morrison's full 53-man projection; Moe Moton calling Mike Gesicki and Erick All "near locks." None of it has landed a score yet. When it does, we'll grade it.

The two graded ones, for the record:

• Rich Eisen, August 2025, on Trey Hendrickson: "Trey Hendrickson's gonna be gunning for, I believe, Joe Flacco week one in Cleveland." Hendrickson was on the 53 from Week 1 — 100 accuracy, zero skill, because the naive assumption said the same thing.
• Shannon Sharpe, May 2025, on Trayvon Henderson: 0 accuracy — zero weeks on the 53.

Two grades is not a record. It's an anecdote. Treat it as one.

Where the grades actually are

Mock drafts carry the volume and the best numbers: 42 graded picks, 61.2 accuracy, +31.62 skill. Playoff picks carry the damage: 15 graded, 6.7 average accuracy, −172.6 skill — the single worst type-level line on this team by a distance.

That number comes from one repeated error. Of 15 graded playoff calls involving Cincinnati, exactly one is a hit, and it's an unsigned Sports Info Solutions piece from September 2022. Everything else is the 2025 preseason field putting the Bengals in the AFC bracket. Colin Cowherd filed four of them across March, May, August and September 2025, each graded 0 with −200 skill, including: "the easiest pick in the NFL this year for a team that didn't make the playoffs last year and will this year is Cincinnati." Chad Millman had them in his 14, and in the division: "I had Cincinnati winning the division." Division-winner calls on Cincinnati: 8 graded, 0.0 accuracy.

The win totals say the same thing more precisely. Seven graded 2025 win-total calls on Cincinnati, none lower than nine, against six actual wins.

Who did well, and on what

The clean wins on this team clustered on one player. Chase Brown has 45 Bengals takes, 10 graded, 89.2 accuracy and +85 skill — the best player line in Cincinnati's file. Marcus Mosher called it earliest, in May 2024: "the player who benefits the most from Mixon leaving is Chase Brown," graded 100 with +200 skill after Brown finished RB12. Peter Schrager (March 2025), Andrew Erickson (twice) and Mason Dodd all repeated it for 2025 and all scored 100/+200 when Brown finished RB10. Pat Fitzmaurice did the same with Tee Higgins as a "low-end wide receiver one" — WR11 actual, 100 accuracy, +200 skill.

The opposite pole is the quarterback. Joe Burrow has 40 takes, 18 graded, 16.2 average accuracy. Andy Furman in February 2026: "Joe Burrow, surrounded by better defense, could be viewed as the best quarterback in the National Football League right now." Graded against passing yards, Burrow finished 30th. Four of the 100 tracked 2025 MVP ballots went to Burrow; Matthew Stafford won.

Pundits with at least five graded Bengals takes:

Five to 13 graded takes is not enough to rank anybody. It is enough to notice that the two biggest Bengals files, Eisen's and Cowherd's, are both deep in the red, and that both are heavy on season-shape calls — playoffs, divisions, win totals — which is where this team ate the field alive.

The Caleb Downs consensus

The sharpest single finding is a mock-draft one. Twelve graded calls in our file put Ohio State safety Caleb Downs at No. 10 to Cincinnati: Mel Kiper ("Caleb Downs, 10 to Cincinnati"), Bucky Brooks three times, JP Acosta three times ("lock and stone, Caleb Downs, number 10 to the Bengals"), Daniel Jeremiah, Colin Cowherd, Mike Renner, Scott Bogman and the Pushing the Pile host. Every one of them scored 95.76 accuracy.

They scored that well because the site grades a mock pick on where the player actually went: Downs was taken 11th. He was taken 11th by the Dallas Cowboys. Cincinnati did not pick in the first round at all — its first selection in the 2026 draft was Cashius Howell at No. 41, followed by Tacario Davis at 72 and Connor Lew at 128.

That is the Bengals coverage report in one line. On slot mechanics, the tracked field was excellent. On what Cincinnati would actually be — a first-round bystander in April, a 6-11 team in the fall — it was, by its own graded numbers, worse than assuming nothing changed.