It's Game on for Bengals Coaches

All of us know the problems. Now they need to be fixed.

The biggest thing the first two weeks have shown is the Bengals at the moment aren’t good enough to win doing what they did last year. Worse, they simply looked unprepared. The biggest question entering this week in New York is, what will the coaches do about it?

This isn’t some halftime adjustment. This is a week of watching video, adapting and teaching. It’s a week for the coaching staff to show its chops.

How do the Men retain their considerable big-play potential without getting Joe Burrow gored in his ribcage? How do they get Joe Mixon running like Joe Mixon (third-most yards rushing in the league last year)?

What do they devise to help Burrow find his rhythm? Hint: It’s hard to get rhythmic when you’re pulpy-bruised. I mean, Michael Jackson moon-walked his way through life without ever once being blind-sided by an edge rusher.

Rhythm-and-bruise isn’t the answer. Burrow isn’t on the MMA undercard.

The Bengals issues aren’t complex. Just this morning, a million miles from PayJoe Stadium, a man awoke in his cave on Borneo and declared, “They need to emphasize the short passing game!’’ Riders on the bullet train in Tokyo nodded their assent.

There’s a thin, L line between urgency and panic in the NFL. You have 17 games to get things straight, not 162. You can’t send a right tackle on a rehab assignment.

The players you have are the players you have. Supposedly they are better than the guys you had last year.

So. . . what?

It’s possible Zac Taylor’s future long-term employment as an NFL head coach depends on the answer. Ditto for the future successes of his assistants. I still say tone-setting is the most important job for a head coach, in any sport. These are my expectations. Here is what happens when they aren’t met. But there does come a time when the head guy and his lieutenants need to roll up their sleeves and roll out a game plan befitting the situation they’re in. That time here is now.

The Jets aren’t very good. Their defense has allowed 54 points in two games, 30 last week to Jacoby Brissett. They have three sacks. There will be no TJ Watt or Micah Parsons around to rip off Joey B’s head and spit down his neck.

I don’t think 0-3 is fatal to a team with playoff beliefs. Even if only six teams who’ve started that way have ever made the postseason. Different year, different team, different league. The AFC North is currently going south. It’s not hard to see 10-7 winning it.

But good times better start Sunday. If the Bengals begin 2022 with losses to Trubisky, Rush and Flacco, there won’t be enough fingers in the world to point at Zac Taylor and his staff.

Now, then. . .

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MY DAD DIED four years ago today, six days short of his 86th birthday. Men of a certain age can relate to the hole in the soul that passing leaves.

I was 8 in the fall of 1966 when my birth mother took her own life. For the next two years, Jim Daugherty was my everything. Father, mother, protector, defender, lifeline. Someone who had to have an answer when I asked him, “Dad, when is mom coming home?’’

Sports helped us survive. We rode the Greyhound from our apartment in suburban DC to Baltimore, to watch the Bullets. I was a big NBA fan. Those Bullets had Wes Unseld, Earl Monroe and Gus “Honeycomb’’ Johnson, the first man to shatter a backboard with a dunk. We’d go every time the 76ers were in town. The Sixers of Wilt, Hal Greer and Chet Walker were my team.

My dad had two season tickets to the Washington Redskins. We never missed a game at RFK Stadium. Especially in those two seasons when all we had was each other.

The loneliness was tangible, no less real than the calendar on the wall. Sports did what sports are supposed to do for fathers and sons. Entertained us, propped us up with occasional joy. Gave us a one-ness.

You know what I mean.

Jim Daugherty wasn’t a rah-rah parent, he didn’t think I was perfect, he didn’t blame others for my shortcomings. Teachers got the benefit of the doubt when it came to issues with me. My dad never lived vicariously through my (limited) sports endeavors. I quit the wrestling team when I was a senior in high school. Got sick of cutting weight. He said only, “don’t make a habit of running from the tough stuff.’’

He never did. I’ve tried not to.

The father-son relationship can be fraught. It’s always complex. I don’t know why, exactly. I don’t think any of us do. My dad and I dealt with it, to be sure, and there were years later in my father’s life when our relationship ebbed because of it. I’ve never forgotten who he was to me in those two years, though.

I told him so as he lay dying, four Septembers ago. “Dad,’’ I whispered to him, “you saved my life.’’

Jim remarried two years after my birth mother passed. Elsye saved my life, too, in a different way. I would never again be a latch-key kid, afraid to come home from school, for what I might see when I walked through the door. Mothers are the security every kid needs.

They do heavy lifting. But they aren’t dads. Miss you, Jim Daugherty.