At one point during Riley Reiff’s visit to Cincinnati that went from day to night to morning, a Bengals coach told the 6-foot-6, 305-pound tackle there was no way he was going to let him leave town without signing a contract.
Reiff wouldn’t identify which coach, but he said, “I don’t know if he could have stopped me.”
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So that rules out offensive line coach Frank Pollack.
But really, the who is irrelevant. All that matters is that it’s moot.
Reiff signed a two-year contract and was free to leave town unimpeded to get on with his offseason, while the Bengals were free to exhale knowing they were able to keep the last best option out there from getting away.
The Bengals went into free agency with the clear and stated mission of upgrading the offensive line to protect quarterback Joe Burrow. And while they had been successful in adding four starters on defensive, they woke up Friday morning with an offensive line that still looked the same the day the season ended. Still looked the same that November Sunday in Washington when Burrow lay writhing on the turf with a shredded left knee.
Signing Reiff was a must-win, a daunting proposition for an organization that hasn’t won much of anything lately.
That’s why they pulled out all the stops, taking Reiff to dinner at The Precinct with their four new defense starters — defensive end Trey Hendrickson, defensive tackle Larry Ogunjobi and cornerbacks Chidobe Awuzie and Mike Hilton — along with coaches, front office members, including team owner Mike Brown, and Burrow himself.
A steak, a cigar, a good night’s sleep and $7.5 million dollars later, Reiff gave head coach Zac Taylor one of the most significant wins since becoming Bengals head coach.
“I think we did a really good job being patient,” Taylor said. “You know, there were some really high-end players that you’d love to add to the fold. And we got one in Riley Reiff. So, just being patient throughout the process, we had several needs we wanted to address. I think we were patient and got what we wanted. If you asked us last week how we’d hope this would turn out, it would look like it does today. And so it doesn’t matter how you got there. We got there.”
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But “there” in no way means the finish line. Replacing Bobby Hart — whom the team released Friday, adding $5.8 million in cap space that nearly offset the Reiff signing — and replacing him at right tackle with a 10-year veteran whose hallmarks are stability and consistency, the Bengals have a better offensive line than they had yesterday.
Equally as important, they gave themselves a flexible tomorrow, as whiffing on Reiff would have forced them to use the No. 5 overall pick in the draft on a tackle. That option is still very much in play, but that’s exactly what it is, an option. Not a mandate.
And the cringeworthy possibility of having to start two rookies on the offensive line is out the window.
If tackle — and specifically Oregon’s Penei Sewell — is the way they go, the Week 1 offensive line most likely would be Jonah Williams at left tackle, Sewell at left guard, Trey Hopkins, if recovered from ACL surgery, at center, Xavier Su’a-Filo at right guard and Reiff, with his 127 career starts, at right tackle.
Asked if the signing of Reiff means he has his starting tackles for 2021, Taylor affirmed it.
“Yes,” He said. “Riley playing right tackle, and Jonah playing left tackle.”
But … options.
“The thing that you love about those two guys is they’re extremely flexible,” Taylor added. “They would do whatever you asked them to do, play guard, center, play right tackle, play left tackle. They just want to help the team win. And so when you have guys like that, it puts you in a tremendous position to be flexible throughout the process. But both those guys are gonna have great futures for us at those positions.”
So if the Bengals draft Sewell and he comes in and destroys everyone in his path in training camp and the team decides to start him at tackle, how would that sit with Reiff?
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“I told them I would play wherever,” he said. “I am open to anything. I am just here to protect Joe and win a lot of football games. I played guard in college. Wherever they ask me to play I will step in and play.”
Would it make more sense to draft a tackle at No. 5 and put the rookie in the spot you expect to play the next 10 years rather than asking him to move to a new position on top of learning a new playbook and adjusting to a new level?
Or would putting the rookie inside help ease the transition from college to the NFL — particularly for someone like Sewell, who is only 20 years old with 20 career games played in college in a conference void of elite edge rushers — be the way to go?
“I think it all depends on where that player fits and the body type and the projection,” Bengals offensive coordinator Brian Callahan said. “Is he going to be a tackle full time? Is he a tackle that’s going to be a guard? And if he’s a tackle, can he play both sides, left and right? There’s a lot of factors that go into that.
“If you look around the league and how guys have broken players into those spots, some play right, then move to left, some play their position right away. Whatever it was they were drafted as, they play,” he continued. “I know in the past years, guys have played guard before they moved to tackle. I don’t think there’s one way to do it. I think the situation would be determined by the player and how that fits with their skill set. It’s hard to make a hard and fast rule on what that would look like. But there is a lot of ways to go about doing that.”
Signing Reiff opens more than just the choice of who to draft at 5. It enhances the option of even drafting there at all.
If one of the top four quarterbacks is still on the board when it’s time for the Bengals to pick, there will be offers from teams to move up, which could turn into bidding wars. The Bengals could pick up an extra second-round pick — or more — to move down a handful of picks — or more — and still land a starting-caliber offensive lineman such as Northwestern’s Rashawn Slater or USC’s Alijah Vera-Tucker.
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The Burrow bounce that helped attract this year’s class of free agents could be followed by the Reiff ripple.
“I think we’ve done well for ourselves, the way that it’s all played out,” Taylor said.
Callahan said the way it played out, watching the team sign defensive players on each of the first three days of free agency, never shook him, even as one offensive line target after another — some expensive longshots, some more ideal fits — signed with other teams.
He likened it to a Sunday in the fall.
“You always have a plan when you into free agency that’s a starting point, just like you would in any game. You’ve got your game plan, you think you know what’s going to happen, and things don’t always go how you think it’s going to happen,” he said. “That’s just how it is. You pivot and adjust and adapt to whatever the next best players are.
“I think (director of pro scouting) Steve Radicevic and his set up of the free agency plan was outstanding, to be able to have multiple places to turn to when things didn’t go the way that we might have initially planned,” Callahan said. “If somebody went off the board who we were on, we’d go to the next one. And we had a good list of how that was going to work. It was a well-thought-out plan and it worked, ultimately, pretty well. We knew it wasn’t going to be real heavy on offensive players on the first day or two anyway, just because of the depth of the class, particularly at the offensive line, there wasn’t a lot of guys. There were a couple of guys that were going to get a ton of money, and that’s kind of what we expected.”
Sticking with Callahan’s analogy, signing Reiff was like a two-minute drill that ends in a touchdown as time expires.
The Bengals had to get him, and they weren’t shy in tipping their hand.
“My agent reached out to me and was like, ‘These guys are being pretty persistent. Would you like to go see what they are all about?'” Reiff said. “I said, ‘absolutely.’ Not being in this division, we really didn’t have much crossover. Once I got here, I was super impressed with the guys, coaches and I’m excited.
“I think I fit what they are trying to do around here.”
(Photo: Brad Rempel / USA Today)