Bengals-Chargers Was A Thrilling Mess Of A Sunday Nighter

There's nothing quite like an exciting Sunday Night Football game. After a day of sitting on the couch mainlining RedZone, it's a nice, healthy step-down to sit back and enjoy just one game in the moment. If that game delivers, then all the better. There have been some fun ones this season, even as recently as last weekend with the Jared Goff interceptionpalooza. But for my money, Sunday's match-up between the Chargers and Bengals was the best Sunday night game of the season. Both teams, at separate times and sometimes at the same time, looked like they were trying to gift the game away; this somehow only made the game itself more compelling. A battle of weaponized incompetence might not sound like riveting viewing, but both teams traded periods of dominance across 60 minutes, and the only reason really that the Chargers came out ahead 34-27 is that they choked just a bit less in the final quarter.

If you want to be more generous than that, the Chargers won because they executed one more time than the Bengals did in the fourth, but that would ignore how Los Angeles built up a comfortable 27-6 lead on the arm of Justin Herbert, only to abruptly and completely forget how to play defense. Let's start with Herbert, though, because he was absolutely dealing in the first half. Herbert completed his first six passes on the night for 123 yards and two TDs, the first of which was a beautiful laser down the seam to tight end Will Dissly. The second was even better, as Herbert took a wide bootleg right before swerving left and leaving his feet for a bullet to a wide open Quentin Johnson in the end zone:

On the next drive, J.K. Dobbins converted on a fourth-and-goal from the one, and a field goal at the end of the half made it 24-6 Chargers. At this point, this seemed heading towards a blowout in the vein of, say, the 37-15 Steelers/Jets Sunday night game from Week 7; the bad sort of Sunday game, then, in which every possession makes the case for going to bed early. So all the more credit to the Bengals for, ahem, roaring back. After the Chargers opened the third with a field goal, Joe Burrow and co. got to work. On the team's third trip into the red zone—the previous two ended in field goals by Evan McPherson; more on him in a bit—the Bengals finally got in the end zone thanks to a poor defensive play call from the Chargers. With fourth-and-goal from the four, the Chargers blitzed heavy, leaving JaMarr Chase one-on-one with rookie corner Cam Hart on the left. Burrow saw it and hit his no. 1 receiver in stride to make it 27-13.

After Herbert took a painful looking sack on the next drive's third down, the Bengals got the ball back and hit hard and fast: On fourth-and-2 from the 42, Tee Higgins hit a beautiful double move in and out down the seam, and Burrow had maybe the easiest touchdown pass of his season to his wide-open receiver. Now it was 27-20. You can see where this is going, and everyone watching could, too.

Let's go back to Herbert for a second, though. While he's not what anyone would consider a Running Quarterback, Herbert has shown the ability to escape the pocket to pick up yards on the ground, and he did it twice in the first half to keep drives going for the Chargers. Maybe that success put a bit too much dip in his chip, or maybe it was just bad luck, but Herbert opened the fourth quarter with another nice-looking run, only to fumble as he was hit by Logan Wilson, giving the Bengals the ball back down a score and with plenty of time left. They didn't need all that much time, though, as a quick seven-play drive ended with another Chase touchdown, guided quite nicely by Burrow. And just like that, in about a quarter of game time, a 27-6 lead turned into a 27-27 deadlock.

Now, I did mention McPherson, who hit his first two field goals on the night from 26 and 27 yards. Unfortunately for him, the Bengals kicker seemed to catch whatever kicker flu is going around the NFL, the same one that led to Eagles kicker Jake Elliot hooking three kicks left on Thursday night. McPherson followed suit twice on Sunday. First, with 7:35 left in the fourth, he narrowly hooked a 48-yarder from the left hash, which is fine and happens to the best of kickers. Less excusable, though, was his kick with 1:52 left. While a 51-yarder isn't a chip shot by any stretch of the imagination, the Bengals lined the ball up on the right hash for McPherson, and he nevertheless still managed to hook it quite garishly left, leaving the score tied at 27-27 under the two-minute warning.

The Chargers hadn't gotten all of the second-half sludge out of their cleats, though, and went three-and-out in quick fashion to give the Bengals the ball back with 1:34 left. Cincinnati got a first down, then followed it with three incomplete passes and gave the ball back yet again. A nice punt pinned L.A. back at its own 14-yard-line with 45 seconds left and two timeouts. This is where I must mention Ladd McConkey, the rookie wide receiver from Georgia with the incredible name. McConkey had himself a night on Sunday, finishing with six catches for 123 yards, none bigger than the two he had on the final drive. On the first play of that drive from the 14, Herbert spotted McConkey in one-on-one coverage on the right side; McConkey is listed at a generous-seeming six feet and isn't particularly burly, but he went up and beat Mike Hilton for the ball, moving the Chargers to their own 45-yard-line with 35 seconds left.

Two plays later, Herbert found McConkey wide open on the other side of the field, taking the ball down to the Bengals 29. Somehow, this all took just 19 seconds, and with 26 seconds left and already in field goal range, the Chargers could have tried to line up for a game-winning field goal and called it a night. No one told Dobbins that, though, and the former Ravens running back busted out wide behind a pulling guard, juked Bengals corner Cam Taylor-Britt, and dove into the end zone to give the Chargers a 34-27 lead with just 18 seconds to go.

(To Dobbins' credit, I hate when players go down at the one-yard-line to kill more clock, and with how kicking has gone this year, I respect not leaving the game up to even just a chip shot attempt from the one.)

Of course, that wasn't game over; this game wasn't that simple. Burrow found Andrei Iosivas open down the middle of the field on the first play of the next drive, moving Cincy to the Chargers 43 with 10 seconds left. After a failed attempt to get a chunk of yards through Chase on the right sideline, Burrow then chucked the ball into the end zone as time expired. Higgins was actually quite close to catching it—whether he would have been in the end zone after landing or not is a question I can't answer—but Chargers safety Derwin James arrived just in time to break up the pass and seal the win for the hosts.

Phew, that was a lot! Credit to the NFL's schedule constructors, who put together two teams with a long and not-so-proud history of collapses for a weekend capper. While the Chargers, now 7-3, might want to look at the defensive tape from the third quarter in order to prevent another 21-point comeback, the Bengals, who fell to 4-7 for the season, will rue that its first half red zone trips only ended in field goals, or that McPherson decided to cosplay me on the golf course in the two biggest kicks of the game in the fourth. Whatever these teams focus on in the coming week, I'm glad that they stumbled back-and-forth through what ended up being an extremely fun, if somewhat stupid, Sunday nighter. That's the most I can ask for from the time slot on any given Sunday.